Khrustalyov, My Car! (Aleksei German, 1998)

Khrustalyov, My Car!

1998 // Russia // Aleksei German

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Hands down the most perplexing and incomprehensible film I have watched this year, yet at once I’m in utter awe the entire two-and-a-half-hour running time. That doesn’t surprise me at all since I had experienced similar reverence out from watching Aleksei German’s MY FRIEND IVAN LAPSHIN (1984) and his swan song HARD TO BE A GOD (2013), still I would say KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR is the most daring, piercing political nightmare that German has bought up with by his idiosyncratic, carnivalesque, elaborated shots.

The plot, if one could fathom through the ludicrous, impromptu scenarios stitched together in a disjointed, elusive manner, is rather simple and provocative. The story takes place some time before the death of Stalin in 1953, during the Doctor’ Plot, a state-sponsored antisemitic campaign accusing a group of Jewish doctors of conspiring to assassinate the inner circle of Stalin’s regime. It’s the first time I have ever heard of this part of Soviet Union history, but the film spends no time on exposition at all, the best we could get is a short introductory passage before the film started. Instead German renders the absurdity of existence in extreme paranoia and anxiety conjured from surveillance and totalitarian suppression into a comical, disorientating virtuosity that offers no comfort and redemption.

The main character, General Yuri Georgievich Klensky (Yuri Tsuriloo), is a Jewish doctor that’s famous for doing ‘open skull surgery.’ His broad shoulder and bestial bald head evoke a bravado that earns no sympathy from the audience while we contemplate his downfall. His apathy and lack of inertia in helping his Jewish colleagues, his passive acknowledgment in unraveling his doppelgänger (a body double assigned from the state to provide false confession in court) he encountered in the hospital, and his superfluous endeavor in escaping the inevitable arrest seem to be surrealistic.

Indeed the film is sparsely punctuated by narration from his son, Alesha (Mikhail Dementyev), from a retrospective viewpoint as a grownup. Alesha serves as a surrogate of German himself and hence the film could be viewed as a blend of allusion to his childhood memory and his imagination if his father was arrested and deported. The film confounds by moving in a rapid speed while the audience is required to continuously decipher every tiny piece of information, no matter verbal or visual (and also aural which often comes in and out of the context, say a lion roaring in the neighborhood), and reestablish our interpretation once the plot proceeds.

The brutality often erupts unexpectedly, the gang rape of General Klensky inside a champagne truck in which he and other ‘criminals’ are being transported to the prison camp is an utter shock. Later when Klensky is sent to treat a dying patient of a higher rank, who is later identified as Stalin himself, the camera never tries to conceal the visceral degradation when Stalin vomits foam from his mouth. It’s more subversive than, say, the comedic death in THE DEATH OF STALIN (2017).

The film is a depiction of the Stalin era in a hyper-realistic temperament which is at once dreamy, alike Fellini, and horrifying, akin to Elem Klimov’s COME AND SEE (1985). It’s the most challenging film I have watched in my recent memory and I wouldn’t dare to recommend it to anyone easily. I Believe there’re lots of subtexts and historical allusion which I hardly realize in the first watch, and probably will never find out, even they’re hidden in plain sight. But if you’re interested, even remotely, in cinema that’s intellectually demanding and sensually exhaustive, KHRUSTALYOV, MY CAR would plausibly resonate with you.

Film’s Trailer