| Khrustalyov, My Car! | |
| Director: | Aleksei German |
| Producer: | Aleksandr Golutva Armen Medvedev Guy Séligmann |
| Starring: | Yuriy Tsurilo |
| Music: | Andrey Petrov |
| Cinematography: | Vladimir Ilyin |
| Editing: | Irina Gorokhovskaya |
| Distributor: | PolyGram Filmed Entertainment |
| Runtime: | 150 minutes |
| Country: | Russia France[1] |
| Language: | Russian |
Khrustalyov, My Car! (Russian: Хрусталёв, машину!|Khrustalyov, mashinu!) is a 1998 Russian comedy-drama film directed by Aleksei German and written by German and Svetlana Karmalita. It was produced by Canal+, CNC, Goskino, Lenfilm and VGTRK.
On the first day of the cold spring of 1953 two events occur, not comparable in importance: fireman Fedya Aramyshev is arrested and "the greatest leader of all times and peoples" Joseph Stalin is found lying on the floor of his dacha.
Some time before these incidents, we see events from the life of military-medical service general Yuri Klensky. In the Soviet Union, the Doctors' plot, in which a group of predominantly Jewish doctors are accused of a plot to kill Stalin, is in full swing. But Klensky, himself Jewish, cheers himself up with almost non-stop drunkenness, hopes that Soviet justice will not touch him. However, a number of events suggest that Klensky's hopes are futile, and that his arrest will soon follow. In an early scene, the general meets his own double in the hospital, and then there is a "foreigner" in his house bearing news about a relative who allegedly lives abroad. Klensky, suspecting that this is a provocation, throws the "foreigner" down the stairs, but a local snitch manages to report in time to the MGB senior about the doctor's contact with foreigners.
Klensky tries to escape, but ends up getting arrested. The general's family is evicted and is placed in a crowded communal apartment, and Klensky himself, after being detained, is left to the criminals who brutally beat and rape him. But then a miracle happens: the bloody general is driven directly from the cell to the country to a certain "high-ranking" patient, who the shocked Klensky learns to be the "Great Leader". Stalin's state is hopeless, he is dying while wheezing and agonizing, and Beria's voice full of triumph utters the first sentence of post-Stalinist Russia, "Khrustalyov, My Car!".
Klensky is immediately released, but he does not return to medicine. Instead, the general "goes to the people". At the end of the film he is the commandant of a train. Drinking happily, he balances a glass of port on his shaved head.
Production of Khrustalyov, My Car! took seven years for writer-director Aleksei German to finish.[2] German was able to bring the film to completion through financial backing from France.[3]
The film premiered at the 51st Cannes Film Festival on May 20, 1998 as part of the main competition for the Palme d'Or award.[4]
During the Cannes premiere of Khrustalyov, My Car!, numerous critics walked out of the screening in disapproval due to its obtuse narrative and lengthy "unfunny" scenes of visual satire.[3] However, film director Martin Scorsese, the jury president for Cannes in 1998, considered it to be the best film in the festival that year.[5] Jacques Mandelbaum of Le Monde also gave the film praise, writing that it is a "carnivalesque record of the Soviet era", and belongs to a category of cinema that "challenges all categories of taste".[6] Writing in 1999, Jean-Marc Durand of the Lyon-based newspaper Le Progrès stated that the film is "incomprehensible, but bewitching", and compared its director Aleksei German to Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini.[6]
Upon its re-release by Arrow Films in December 2018,[5] the film was given renewed critical acclaim. Khrustalyov, My Car! has an approval rating of 100% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 7 reviews, and an average rating of 8.2/10.[7] British film critic Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film five out of five stars, describing it as "a surreal fantasia-epic and nihilist political satire of cynicism and violence".[8] Tara Brady of The Irish Times gave it four out of five stars, stating that "People come and go without introduction or elucidation. All of them are in keeping with the Soviet auteur’s grim view of humanity."[2]
At the 1999 Russian Guild of Film Critics Awards the picture was awarded as Best Film and Aleksei German received the Best Director prize.[9]