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Khrustalyov, My Car!
(Chrustaljov, macinu!)
Russia (1998)
About the film
On a snowy Moscow night in the early 1950s, Stalin's secret police
make their rounds. A voiceover begins a story about "the forgotten
people" of that time. A bald, grinning doctor, The General, is head
of a large, manic household. Scenes shift with the disturbing facility
of a dream. A big Soviet hospital seems to be a madhouse without rules.
Why? Russian viewers realize that Klenski, a general in the Red Army,
has been swept up in the "doctors' plot" organized by the
KGB in 1953.
The doctor makes a halfhearted attempt to flee but is gang-raped
in a shockingly brutal scene. Abruptly, his fate shifts yet again. Being
a doctor, he is pulled out of the camp, cleaned up and taken to see the
dying Stalin. Told in a droll, unique poetic voice that could be called
Socialist magic realism, "Khrustyalov, My Car" is waiting for
the re-appraisal that will allow it to find its proper place among
the works of one of cinema's great Russian masters.
"Leningrad director Alexei Guerman, one of the most singular talents
to emerge from the Soviet Union in the 70s, whose 1982 portrayal of the
bleakness of Soviet society, "My Friend Ivan Lapshin," won him a
cult following inside and outside the USSR, returns to the scene after
16 years… After attempting to finance the project for more than a
decade, Guerman seems to explode with long-repressed ideas like a
swollen balloon spewing forth a cacophony of images, characters and
camera pyrotechnics.—" Deborah Young, Variety
"Years in the making, this alarming phantasmagoria is one of the great
films of the decade: brilliantly directed, unrelentingly grotesque,
savagely bleak... "—J. Hoberman, Village Voice
Director's filmography
Alexei Guerman (b. 1938) graduated from the Leningrad Theatre
institute (1960). After theater practice he started at Lenfilm
in 1964 where he made his debut (co-directed with Gregori
Aronov) The Seventh Fellow-Traveller (1967, Sedmoy
sputnik). He made the following outstanding films in cooperation
with his scriptwriter wife Svetlana Karmalita: Road Checks
(1971-1985, Provierka na dorogakh), Twenty Days Without
War (1976, Ovascat dney bez voyny), My Friend Ivan
Lapshin (1982-1984, Moy drug Ivan Lapshin). In 1990 he
established and started heading the SPIEF Studio of First and
Experimental Film. Khrustalyov, My Car! was shown at the
Cannes Film Festival in Competition.
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137 min., b/w, 35mm
Russian with English subtitles
Director: Alexei Guerman
Screenplay: Svetlana Karmalita, Alexei Guerman
Dir. of photography: Vladimir Ilyne
Sound: N. Astrakhov
Music: Andrei Petrov
Editor: Irina Gorochovskaja
Producer: Guy Seligmann (Sodaperaga), Armen
Medvedev, Alexander Golutva (Goskino)
Production: Sodaperaga (Paris) and Goskino
(Moscow) co-production in association with Arte
(formerly La Sept Cinéma and Canal+), Centre National de la
Cinematographie, SPIEF (Lenfilm Experimental Film Studio) VGTRK
(Russian Federation), Petroagroprombank, Société
"Orimi", M. Zlydnikov
Cast: Yuri Tsurilo, Misa Dementiev, Yuri Yarvet, Nina
Ruslanova, Genrietta Yanovskaya, Alexander Bachirov
Contact: Flach Pyramide International
5, rue Richepanse
75008 Paris
vox: 33 1 42 96 0220
fax: 33 1 40 20 0551
THE HOLLOWAY
FILE
Database of Russian and Ex-Soviet Union directors
FREEDOM FILM FESTIVAL POSTER
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