Fairytale is the film of the holidays and of the year – Francesco Boille

A work of poetry and at the same time high questioning, visually powerful and which probably resembles nothing seen so far in the history of cinema. It is Fairy tale. A fairy tale, the new, very short but dense film by the Russian master Alexander Sokurov which, after its presentation in Competition at the Locarno Film Festival and then at the Turin Film Festival, is now in Italian cinemas. It gets there thanks to the rigor of Academy Two, to which we owe having brought titles such as Memory in Apichatpong Weerasethakul, One year, one night by Isaki Lacuesta, e Bears don’t exist di Jafar Panahi.

It is the film of the holidays but also the film of the year, a compliment not just given that in 2022 cinema, especially arthouse cinema, was full of high-level titles, even if viewers are still a little lazy compared to other countries, such as France. This while in various cities the halls have made and are making a major effort to renew. But here is a truly big-screen film.

In fact, it opens with a vision, a magma, a sort of primordial soup: an overlapping, if not a crowding, of clouds or fog, almost like the dunes in the Sahara desert, whose whiteness is tempered by a blush whose nuances are those of the great frescoes with sunsets or sunrises, but above all it seems that it belongs to the primordial world. Or the Apocalypse with a capital A.

Therefore, as we wrote from Locarno, something that recalls great art right from the start. As in a limbo with infinite shades of gray but with large glimpses of white, as in a world eternally suspended between beauty and ugliness, between nothing and everything, or again as in a sort of purgatory, Adolf Hitler wanders around here, Benito Mussolini, Iosif Stalin and Winston Churchill, with brief appearances of Napoleon Bonaparte and a sad, very suffering Christ, whom the heavenly father seems to keep tyrannically in eternal expectation, almost as if hidden in the cellar.

Around them, powerful, evocative images that recall at times a Gustave Doré, but above all the grandiose prison representations of a Giovanni Battista Piranesi. A large and magnificent prison, perhaps infinite, awaiting the sorting of large – or who claim to be such – and cumbersome characters. Especially since there are also many Stalins, Mussolinis, etc., corresponding to the various eras of the respective characters. And meanwhile they talk and still talk to each other and to the many doubles, or “brothers”, as they define themselves. There is a lot of irony, humor, in this film by the 71-year-old but evergreen Sokurov.

“We need a big paradise, an infinite paradise,” says one of the Hitlers. Rather it seems an infinite narcissism, which often goes hand in hand with an infinite madness or cruelty. Like their smug talkativeness, their infantilism, in eternal ecstasy of themselves.

However, nobody shouts here, but they mumble, talk, rant or at the most declaim (Mussolini), almost the counterpart of the grandeur of the pictorial (re)elaborations (and vice versa). This babel of languages ​​that overlap until they cancel each other out is a small world that has come to an end. Thus, through the subdued tone of speech, in an equally subdued way the x-ray of these fragments of ego also gradually imposes itself, since they were all egomaniacs to the nth degree.

To make all of this credible, the director worked solely on archival images, i.e. without the use of the so-called deep fake – as underlined at the beginning of the film – that is, of that artificial intelligence procedure which allows for the creation, among other things, of false images of really existing people. With great subtlety, Sokurov has created another world, another dimension, a “his of him” world of him. Also thanks to the effort for the lip synchronization of the many dubbers, if one can say so, among which the extraordinary work of the conductor Fabio Mastrangelo for Mussolini must be hailed. And then for the many pieces of music, mostly “fantasies from the themes of European, Russian and Soviet composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from the personal archive of Aleksandr Sokurov”, as the director’s notes inform us.

Even the special effects, visual and sound, must somehow remain in the human sphere, the latter fundamental question of the Russian filmmaker. Already in 1978 with The lonely voice of man, a film censored for almost ten years, Sokurov questions the human condition, recounting the war seen through the prism of two young men who seek love as much as the moral dimension. And basically too Fairytale is a work on the human condition, on the senselessness of man’s existence and action, where the little human being, the one tortured by wars, by senseless massacres, is not only the victim, but also the grandly deceived accomplice for having paid attention to the Ego with a capital E, to the “great visions” – the quotation mark is a must – of these leaders. Moreover, in most cases they are personalities who have pushed ordinary human beings, that is, all of us, to express the worst that is latent in each one, rather than the best. Their pathology is also somewhat ours. But the hatred towards these personalities which is expressed by the dead soldiers, rendered here speaking, is unequivocal of any kind.

Somehow the creator of all things in Fairytale he is not the only judge: the whole of humanity seems to be hidden away, an accomplice of the crimes but at the same time suffering and cheated. Humankind is partly schizophrenic as are these monuments of history completely broken up into many fragments of one’s self, largely an expression of evil rather than good, or which in any case contain a significant part of evil together with good (Churchill , whose colonial era Sokurov seems to criticize in particular in a somewhat satirical manner).

This fairy tale, which is not a fairy tale but as enchanting as a fairy tale, also seems a bit like the synthesis of the various branches in which the director’s vast filmography has unfolded. A sum. That of the interior, intimate monologue on the human condition, like the masterpiece Mother and son (1997), about a dying mother and the insensitivity of magnificent nature to the pain of human beings, as underlined by the references to Caspar Friedrich’s romantic painting. That of the search for the human in the horror of war, from the aforementioned The lonely voice of man ad Alexandra (2007). And then the trilogy on power, Moloch (1999), water Hitler, Tour (2001), su Lenin, e The sun (2005), on the Japanese emperor Hirohito, where this representation of the great figures of history as laughable personalities is already looming. Up to the great museum-films such as The Russian Ark (2002), on the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, e Francophonie (2015), on the Louvre during the Nazi occupation.

Great visions of art and gloomy visions of politics: those of art history and those of the history of humanity for Sokurov do not seem to fit together, unlike the ramifications of his cinema. Without forgetting, sort of appendix, the Faust (2011) from Goethe, where all of humanity seems perhaps destined for limbo, leaving the best of itself only in art. But Sokurov loves humanity, despite everything, as evidenced by his simplicity, his warmth, his attention to young people, his concern for war as when, again in the director’s notes, he writes of “a time immersed in tragedies in the collapse of civilization. Entire cities have fallen into ruin, forests have been reduced to ashes, millions of people who lived in rural areas with their baggage of local folk customs and traditions have been swept away”.

A melting film from the magma, the lava of art and tragic human history, this film about visions is also a visionary film.