Reviews
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Reviews |
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Karen Shakhnazarov, A Rider named Death [Vsadnik po imeni smerti] (2004) reviewed by Elena Monastireva-Ansdell©2005 |
At
the beginning of this century, Moscow experienced first-hand the destructive
violence that has for years besieged the Russian Federation’s peripheral
republic of Chechnya. Ordinary
Muscovites have been profoundly shocked and outraged at the cold-blooded
terrorist assaults on their peaceful lives.
The attack on the Dubrovka Theater (23 October 2002) became Russia’s
“9/11,” in the sense that it brought home the geographically and
psychologically remote hostilities, importing the war into the very heart of
Russia. The wave of suicide
bombings that followed in 2004 has left almost everyone in the country with the
sense that no place is safe and that no one is immune from terror.
As the Russian government trumpets its successes in “normalizing” the
situation in Chechnya and wages war on “international terrorism,” Russians
continue to live in a state of constant fear that further generates ethnic
intolerance and hatred. The tragic
reverberations of this new socio-political phenomenon have recently spawned a
number of cinematic responses by Russia’s leading directors, such as Egor
Mikhalkov-Konchalovskii’s Anti-Killer 2: Anti-Terror (2003), Karen
Shakhnazarov’s A Rider Named Death (2004), and Valerii Todorovskii’s My
Stepbrother Frankenstein (Moi svodnyi brat Frankeshtein, 2004).
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Among
these, Shakhnazarov’s Rider stands out as a historical production, set
in Moscow in the mid-1900s, when a series of carefully planned terrorist attacks
on high governmental officials seized the minds of the Empire’s ordinary
citizens and the ruling elites alike. The
filmmaker views these acts of violence that ushered in the “century of
destruction,” as a prelude to the “apocalyptic” twenty-first century (see
his interview for Itogi).
Rider is the veteran director’s second film―after The
Killer of the Tsar (Tsareubiitsa, 1991)―that explores
contemporary mores through the lens of traumatic events from the Russian past.
The film’s narrative is based on V. Ropshin’s short novel Pale
Horse written and published in 1909. Ropshin
is the penname of Boris Savinkov, a prominent Socialist Revolutionary and a
leader in the party’s Combat Organization, who in 1904-5 organized and guided
a series of anti-governmental terrorist acts, most notably the killings of the
Russian Minister of Inner Affairs, Viacheslav Plehve, and the Governor-General
of Moscow, Grand Duke Sergei Aleksandrovich Romanov. |
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upon the fictional depictions in Ropshin’s novel, as well as on factual data
from Savinkov’s memoirs, the film follows a group of Socialist Revolutionaries
who prepare to assassinate the Moscow Grand Duke (Vasilii Zotov).
Envisioned as a “psychological drama with elements of action,” the
movie heavily employs facial close-ups with blurred backgrounds, expressive
make-up and lighting, and slow-motion sequences to document the terrorists’
anxiety, their personal torments, as well as their moral deliberations and
crises that form part and parcel of their self-sacrificing “work in terror.”
Each of the small combat unit’s members represents a recognizable
social or intellectual type, and nearly all of them articulate their reasons for
joining the Combat Organization. Fedor
(Rostislav Bershauer), who comes from the emerging working class, embraces
terror as a means of meting out social justice and avenging the death of his
fiancée at the hands of tsarist troops. Vania
(Artem Semakin) is a poet, whose profound religious faith brings him to
terrorism as a way of practicing Christian love in a spiritually disconnected
society. Despite recognizing the
grave sinfulness of killing, Vania is convinced that “there is no greater love
in the world than sacrificing one’s soul for others, not [just] the body, but
the soul.” Genrikh (Aleksei
Kazakov), a student, believes in terror’s power to annihilate autocracy.
Erna (Kseniia Rappoport) risks her life preparing bombs because of her
passionate, but unreciprocated, love for George.
After a number of failed attempts upon the Grand Duke’s life, the
group’s leader and chief manipulator, George, brings the assassination plan to
fruition. The most mysterious and aloof of all the terrorists, he lets
nothing stop him from achieving his goal, yet never answers the question about
his motives for joining the Combat Organization. George’s fetishistic preoccupation with and psychological
attraction to his victim becomes the focus of the director’s investigation
into the nature of terrorism. Against
the background of this fatal obsession, George’s hedonistic love for Elena (Anastasiia
Makeeva), a beautiful woman associated with nature’s vital force, symbolizes
the character’s desperate but futile wish for higher meaning and purpose.
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In
the interview with Itogi, Shakhnazarov explained that in making Rider he
intended to explore the psychological motivations that impel individuals to
embrace terror as a means of political struggle. Such a philosophical approach to the issue (adopted from
Ropshin’s novel) helps to explain, but does not entirely justify, the film’s
transplanting of the characters’ physical actions and moral deliberations into
a rather unspecified setting. Nor
does the film consistently apply this historically detached perspective,
especially with regards to sets and characters.
Thus,
Shakhnazarov invests a large portion of the film’s budget into a historically
authentic (albeit far too pristine) in-studio reproduction of pre-revolutionary
Moscow streets, only to suspend the action that takes place there in what seems
almost an historical vacuum. The
film, for the most part, shuns references to the social strife, discontent, and
anxiety that plagued Russian society at the time of the Empire’s humiliating
defeat in the bloody Russo-Japanese War, the government’s repressions against
academic institutions, and its brutal suppression of rapidly-escalating social
unrest. In its failure to reflect
Russia’s critical socio-political condition, the film creates the impression
that the terrorists are involved in terror for terror’s sake, rather than as a
response to the gross injustices of Russia’s autocratic regime.
Fedor’s briefly outlined social grievances, Vania’s religious love
for humanity, and Erna’s romantic love―all ring hollow when juxtaposed
with the disturbingly graphic imagery of innocent bystanders’ mutilated bodies
in the wake of a failed terrorist act. The
viewer starts wondering why the characters even bother philosophizing in the
face of such condemning evidence.
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Further
imbalance in characterization concerns the film’s two main adversaries: the
Grand Duke and George. While an
informed viewer can connect the otherwise unnamed Grand Duke to the historical
figure of Sergei Aleksandrovich Romanov, the film paints a very abstract
portrait of this personage. The
visual markers of his image―an open young face with handsome and noble
features, a neatly trimmed beard fashioned after that of Tsar Nikolai II, a
thoughtful and intelligent look in his eyes, and
his non-threatening posture―all suggest a benevolent aristocratic ruler,
not a reactionary responsible for the persecution of the Jews, the suppression
of the progressive press, and the Khodynka tragedy of 1896. The character of George, by comparison, extends beyond his
novelistic counterpart, incorporating some inglorious aspects of Boris
Savinkov’s post-revolutionary biography into the film’s epilogue.
As opposed to his victim’s humane features, George’s face is heavily
made up and frozen into a semblance of a mask.
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The
theme of masks and theatricality, central to the novel, takes on a different
meaning in the film. Ropshin’s
character perceived himself as a soulless marionette in a universe devoid of
higher ideals. This late Symbolist
perception of the world as a puppet-show moved by an unfathomable force
accurately described the mood of despair and defeat that reigned in the
Socialist Revolutionary Party after the suppression of the 1905 revolution and
the unmasking of a secret police agent-provocateur within its governing
committee and the Combat Organization. Much
as Ropshin’s character deplores his own spiritual degradation, he sees himself
as a product of the despotic regime that turned the entire country into a bleak
prison. The George of the film,
however, acts out the role of the master-manipulator staging his violent play
with an extraordinary sense of detachment and poise.
The final moments of this show are played out during the closing act of
Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, performed at the Bolshoi Theater. As George enters the Grand Duke’s private box and aims a
handgun at his helpless victim, the two men are framed against the background of
the masked ball enacted behind them on stage.
In Verdi’s opera, a small group of self-absorbed conspirators use the
anonymity and confusion of a masked ball to assassinate a benevolent and popular
king. After George fires the lethal
shot and escapes from the theater, he is shown lying on a bed in his
claustrophobic room as the opera continues on the soundtrack.
The chorus’s condemnation of the assassin―“Death and infamy to
the traitor! Let the sword of
vengeance cut him down!”―resounds over George as the camera rises above
him assuming the high-angle position (repeated in the final shot of the film) of
a moral judge.
The
terrorist’s moral bankruptcy reaches its apex when he moves from politically-
to personally-motivated murder. By
killing Elena’s husband, George extinguishes the last spark of humanity within
himself. The spiritual void that
eventually consumes his soul is embodied in a wooden effigy of an unspecified
pagan deity that George keeps on his bedside table. In the context of George’s story about his acquaintance’s
military post in the Congo, where the colonial
soldiers kill local tribesmen out of mere boredom and get killed in return, the
wooden idol epitomizes the bestiality of murder. This reference seems to suggest that regardless of what
religion or ideology the terrorists may use to justify their acts, they all pray
to the same graven image.
Rider,
thus, paints an overall biased image of terrorism.
While successfully de-romanticizing the heroic freedom-fighter, the film
at the same time idealizes the Russian state in the figure of a benevolent ruler
and brushes off the social, political, and ethnic tensions that give rise to
terrorist resistance and dissent. In
this sense, the film upholds the political values of Vladimir Putin’s
presidency with the latter’s emphasis on centralized strong-hand rule as a
guarantor of national (or imperial?) order and stability.
President Putin expressed indirect approval of Shakhnazarov’s project
when he paid a visit to the film’s sets in November 2003 as a part of the
Ministry of Culture’s larger tour of the Mosfilm Cinema Concern, where
Shakhnazarov holds the official post of General Director.
Elena
Monastireva-Ansdell, Oberlin College
A Rider Named Death
[Vsadnik po imeni smerti] (Russia, 2004)
Color,
106 minutes
Director:
Karen Shakhnazarov
Script:
Aleksandr Borodianskii and Karen Shakhnazarov
Cinematography:
Vladimir Klimov
Composer:
Anatolii Kroll
Production
Designer: Liudmila Kusakova
Costumes:
Svetlana Titova
Editor:
Lidia Milioti
Cast:
Rostislav Bershauer, Dmitrii Diuzhev, Anna Gorshkova, Dmitrii Gusev, Aleksei
Kazakov, Anastasiia Makeeva, Andrei Panin, Kseniia Rappoport, Artem Semakin,
Valerii Storozhik, Vasilii Zotov
Producer:
Karen Shakhnazarov
Production: The Mosfilm Cinema Concern and the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
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Karen Shakhnazarov, A Rider named Death [Vsadnik po imeni smerti] (2004) reviewed by Elena Monastireva-Ansdell©2005 |
15/04/05
