RUSSIAN RESURRECTION FILM FESTIVAL: Bleak, brutal and quite beautiful to look at, Tsar, from director Pavel Lugin (The Island), is part historical pageant, part chamber piece, part nightmare.
Set mostly in the shadowy, muck-stained halls of power in the Russia of the 1560s, this big and gritty production, shot by US cinematographer Tom Stern, deals with a battle of wills waged between Ivan IV aka Ivan the Terrible (Pyotr Mamonov) and the newly appointed head of the Orthodox Church, called a Metropolitan, Filipp (Oleg Yankovsky).
Even though Filipp is both Ivan’s first choice and an old pal, the pair quickly find themselves at loggerheads, mostly because the emperor’s private guards, "The Tsar’s Dogs," are busy wreaking havoc across the countryside.
Lugin opens the film with a set piece of savage violence that pre-figures the nastiness that dominates the movies second half; The Dogs are torturing chickens by tossing them in the air and using their sabres to decapitate them before they can fall to the ground. It’s a mad and bloody moment and Lugin and co-screenwriter Alexey Ivanov use it to demonstrate that here life is cheap and the violence that dominates this Russia has no real meaning beyond a desire to instil terror in the powerless.
Mamonov’s portrait is intriguingly complex; with his bad teeth, flashing eyes and a voice like a strangled cat, he comes off instantly as mad. But there are moments that suggest that in some way the Tsar is playacting the 'crazy man". Treated like a deity, Ivan here seems to fear emotional intimacy most. This makes the scenes with Filipp so poignant, even suspenseful; will the Churchman 'crack’ the Tyrant’s mask?
Still, for all of its dramatic richness Tsar is an odd piece that’s a little hard to key into. Movies like this don’t need warmth or sentiment; they’ve got palace intrigue and spectacle going for them. But the mood here is positively dour and its outlook is so downbeat it makes Dostoevsky look positively happy-go-lucky by comparison. At times it feels like some sort of horror movie; even the violence, delivered in graphic doses of blood and gore, is so blunt and cruel it’s impossible to get too excited by it. There’s one horrible bit where the Tsar’s soldiers are tortured by having them thrown to a wild bear and eaten alive in a public arena.
In that sense, this is a very serious movie; where a more conventional historical epic would strike a righteous pose when it comes to the villain, while relishing the bloodbaths they conjure, Tsar finds only disgust and a kind of bewilderment.
