A postapocalyptic sci-fi movie about moral anxiety.
There has been an ecological catastrophe on Earth. The planet has turned into an enormous garbage dump with factories dotted among it. This unprecedented industrial pollution has led to 80% of babies being born developmentally disabled, as a result of which they are labeled «degenerates» and placed on reservations. This atheist society, which has lost hope of stopping the catastrophe, finds salvation in entertainment. The «degenerates» have their own religion and believe that a Messiah will appear.
This is the second film in the Apocalypse Trilogy by Konstantin Lopushansky, a student and follower of Andrei Tarkovsky, and was released as the Soviet Union was nearing its end. It provides a phantasmagoric view of the main fears and aspirations of the perestroika period: a sense of moral crisis, the collapse of materialist ideology, a fear of irreversible ecological changes, and a search for God. And if the first part of the trilogy, Dead Man’s Letters, explores the search for meaning, A Visitor to a Museum refers directly to the need for general repentance. The museum in the title is the ruins of an ancient city, the religious buildings of a lost civilization that can only been seen as a result of a dangerous journey to the depths of a poisoned sea during a short period when the tide is out. The main character decides to do this in order to get in touch with the past, but during his immersion in the spiritual culture of the «degenerates» he experiences religious ecstasy. The most striking part of the film is the image of the society of «degenerates» praying to God to be freed from the collapsing, transitory world. For these scenes Lopushansky cast dozens of patients from Soviet psychiatric hospitals.
A Visitor to a Museum
Director Konstantin Lopushansky
USSR, Germany, Switzerland, 1989, 136 min. 12+
