A grandiose, years-long project by Aleksei German based on the eponymous novella by the Strugatsky brothers.
On a planet that resembles Earth in the Middle Ages, Earthling observers try to influence events without disrupting the logical development of history. Despite understanding the importance of neutrality, Don Rumata of Estor cannot help but get involved when one of the planet’s cities is captured by the cruel Black Brotherhood.
Hard to Be a God is as enormous a phenomenon as it is monstrous: radical, with multiple characters, unbearably hyperrealistic, and filled with incredible brutality. The film was a legend long before it was released. In what was proclaimed as his final work, Aleksei German, one of the most important and revered Russian directors of the postwar period, took the cinema of «maddening texture» (as defined by the Soviet censors) to its limit with a polyphony of sounds, numerous details, and long, meandering shots that immerse the viewer in the thick of an action so excessive that it seems impossible to avoid. Fourteen years of work on the film, unprecedentedly complex and tortuous shoots, and an endless wait for the final result, which was shown to viewers only after the director’s death, all made Hard to Be a God one of the most ambitious post-Soviet movie projects. The choice of literary material that was no less significant in its time gives the film even more symbolic importance. The Strugatsky brothers’ novella was a bitter but not hopeless, 1960s reflection on the nature of totalitarianism presented as allegorical science fiction. In the 50 years since its publication, this work and its spirit underwent serious changes in German’s hands. His story of butchery in Arkanar leaves no room for the progressive ideas of the Thaw. This exhausting, extremely physiological journey to another planet mercilessly confronts us with the brutality and ideological lack of alternative of post-Soviet reality.
Hard to Be a God
Director Aleksei German
Russia, 2013, 177 min. 18+
