Arrives today from the depths of the Russian night like an anachronistic and lame meteor, with its fascinating staging and its heavy but unstoppable metaphor: faced with the obscurantism that comes, one is in shit to the neck.
How can I tell you about something that I am absolutely unable to describe in words…
Have you read Journey to the End of the Night? Do you remember the passage to Africa? Céline manages to describe in simple words an atmosphere so oppressive and sticky that it ends up sticking to your skin and making you uncomfortable ... literally speaking.
If Céline was a genius for writing, Alexei Guerman was a genius for cinema, and it is certainly not his last posthumous work that will make this state of affairs lie. But before talking about the film itself, we need to go back to the origins of film.
Hard to be a god is at the base a very famous Russian science fiction novel signed by the Strugatski brothers in 1964. Interested rather in the adaptation of this work, Guerman preferred at the time, to leave "sleep" the project, when he found that the competent Russian "validation" authorities wanted to impose scenes on him so that they validate the project of the film. The director therefore waited until the year 2000 to raise the funds and undertake the film as he imagined doing it almost 20 years ago.
The shooting lasted nine years, the post-production lasted until 2013, and Alexei Guerman did not see his work finished since it was his son who completed the project in place of his father. Hard to be a god, therefore, will have asked many of its participants, the ambition displayed by the power of the novel being at the height of the force of the images.
Shot in black and white ("Because memories have no colors" said Guerman), spanning almost three hours, and indisputably one of a kind, Hard to be a god will have succeeded in getting away several dozen spectators throughout the session. If provoking this type of reaction is not necessarily something negative, it is in any case never a harmless phenomenon. We are indeed here facing a demanding, immersive and deeply disturbing film. We must not only be able to bear the emerging malaise of the images, but also find our bearings in an opaque narrative labyrinth where we often find ourselves completely lost, lost in the oblivion of the strange dialogues of the heroes of the film.
Sometimes gangrened by the visceral hatred of the intellectuals of this world or completely lost in the strange codes of their archaic communications, the population strives to try to warm itself up with lifeless fires which seem to rot them even more from within by stigmatizing with large reinforcements of purulent and coarse pustules. Doesn't that look pretty - pretty as a decor? Does that seem decaying to you? Sticky and putrid? Well here you are, you are getting closer and closer ... but we are not quite there yet.
Because letting yourself go only in my poetico-morbid delusions could make you forget to tell you about the incredible technical work around the film. If it is indeed not easy to be able to capture in a simple way what is happening on the screen (black and white adds to the harshness of the decor, wedged somewhere between iron and wood) we quickly understand that everything was thought surgically, that the two successive cinematographers had to tear their hair out more than once and that the many differences in the history of the film are as many metaphors as stylized images. Not easy to follow because politics in more ways than one Hard to be a God has the luxury of fascinating as much as putting off. Colossal in the work he required, ambitious in his idea and incredible in the end, Hard to be a god is one of those rare films to be distinguished from other films, his dreamlike paradoxically so down to earth seeming at times as evanescent and unreal. Big screen art.
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