Parky at the Pictures (DVD 28/3/2019)

In the present day, Anne (Julie Christie) sets off to India to research the 1920s experiences of her great-aunt. Armed with the letters that Olivia Rivers (Greta Scacchi) had written to her sister (Anne's grandmother) and a taped interview with Olivia's old friend, Harry Hamilton-Paul (Nickolas Grace), Anne arrives in Satipur, which was once the capital of the princely state of Khatm that was ruled over by the Nawab (Shashi Kapoor). She finds lodgings with Inder Lal (Zakir Hussain), who lives with his mother (Tarla Mehta) and his wife, Ritu (Ratna Pathak), and soon finds herself becoming as intrigued by their travails as she is by the plight of the unfortunate Olivia. 

She is married to Douglas Rivers (Christopher Cazenove), the assistant collector of Satipur, whose superior is Arthur Crawford (Julian Glover), who is married to Beth, the Burra Memsahib (Susan Fleetwood). Among those in their social circle are medical officer Dr William Saunders (Patrick Godfrey), his wife, Joan (Jennifer Kendal), Harry Hamilton-Paul and Major Carter Minnies (Barry Foster), who is the political agent to the Nawab, who is very much subservient to his mother, Begum Mussarat Jahan (Madhur Jaffrey).

Looking directly into the camera to deliver in monologue the letter that Anne is reading in the present day, Olivia describes being presented at the Nawab's court, where the Begum and her entourage sit behind a mesh curtain, smoke cigarettes and peer through the binoculars at the colonial officials trying to curry favour with the Nawab in a bid to bind his protectorate more closely to the crown. The Begum is amused by Olivia having to spit out a delicacy that has been served to her, but the new arrival is also aware of the pomposity of the ceremonial that prevents the British emissaries and the Nawab being frank with each other. 

Such problems continue into the present, as Anne comes to see the office where Inder Lal works (because it used to be her great-aunt's bungalow) and he is embarrassed as his workmates have inferred that the white woman is waiting for him because they have a sexual relationship. He laments their ignorance and how affairs between the genders are so complicated, but he is also stressed because Ritu is prone to night terrors and his mother has to perform traditional rituals in an effort to calm her down. 

Inflamed passions also concern Mrs Saunders, who confides in Olivia that Indian men are only after one thing because the spices in their diet overheats their blood. She is still mourning the loss of her child and Inder Lal shows Anne the stone angel that was imported from Italy to adorn the grave. He teases her about being unmarried and, when she reveals that she had just been jilted by her newly divorced lover, he jokes that he should find her an Indian husband so she can have lots of babies. His indiscretion is matched by Olivia blurting out at a reception hosted by the Begum that her son is a handsome man who would be the dashing darling of any London drawing-room. 

As she is still finding her feet, Olivia pleads with Rivers not to send her to Simla for the summer, as she would rather be hot and irritable with him than bored with a bunch of hobnobbing memsahibs. At a dinner party at the palace, Olivia blunders through the wrong door and finds herself alone with the Nawab and his servant. He politely asks her to leave and Rivers escorts her to supper. She chatters happily with Hamilton-Paul, who concedes that he has introduced the Nawab to his entirely unsuitable English wife. Mrs Saunders gossips to her neighbour that the Begum had poisoned the woman to prevent losing influence over her son, but nobody knows the real story. 

Everyone falls silent, as the Nawab recalls how an ancestor had once answered a slight by inviting his foe to a tented banquet and then cut the guy ropes so that his guests were trussed up for slaughter. Undaunted, the British contingent join the Nawab for musical entertainment in an awning in the garden, fresh from accusing him among themselves of being in cahoots with a band of looters rampaging around the countryside under the orders of Dacoit chief, Tikuran (Sajid Khan). They hope to expose him and use his complicity as an excuse to depose him. But, for now, they maintain the civilities and frown on Olivia when she slips away from the rest of the women to listen to the raga from a bench by a fountain. She is joined by Hamilton-Paul, who acts as the Nawab's go-between and she is delighted when he extends the invitation to a private dinner with her husband. 

Instead of being honoured, Rivers is dismayed because the invitation breaks protocol and he reprimands Olivia for disporting herself in front of the servants in her nightgown. She complains of being bored and threatens to run away unless he spends more time with her. No sooner had she spoken than the Nawab calls to sweep her away for a picnic with his retinue to make up for River declining the dinner date. Hamilton-Paul acts as their chaperone, as they sip wine, explore a temple built to commemorate a military victory and play musical cushions on a large rug spread across the dusty ground. As Anne recalls in her notes, Olivia had meant to tell Rivers about her day out, but he had arrived home late and she had contented herself with describing the scene to her sister, instead. 

Anne attends a ceremony at the temple that is now used by Muslims and Hindus and she notes that things have a habit of getting muddle up in India. At the river's edge, she meets Chid (Charles McCaughan), an American sannyasi who came to India seeking enlightenment and discarded his past when a guru gave him the name `Chidananda' (`bliss of mind'). He invites himself back to her digs and Inder Lal is happy for him to stay, as charity provides good karma for the next life. 

However, Anne soon tires of Chid rummaging through her papers and trying to talk her into sleeping with him so that they can enjoy tantric love. When she tries to throw him out, however, Ritu welcomes him back and Anne feels guilty when her mother-in-law summons another traditional medicine man to try and cure her psychological ills. She asks Inder Lal to let her take Ritu to a doctor in Delhi, but Chid tells her to stop interfering in family matters and accuses her of thinking that she is Olivia reincarnated. It comes as a relief, therefore, when Chid accompanies Ritu and her mother-in-law on a pilgrimage. 

Their journey reminds Anne of the time that Hamilton-Paul sought sanctuary with Olivia during a time of sandstorms and civil unrest. Rivers was under great strain after witnessing an acid fight between two women in the market and having turned the guns on a demonstration that he is convinced was provoked by the Dacoit bandits to unsettle the British community. Beth comes to reassure Olivia that everything is under control and offers Hamilton-Paul a chance to return to Blighty to see his ailing mother. But the Nawab woos him back to the palace and, when Olivia comes to see him when he falls sick, her host presses her for information about what rumours the collector and his cronies have heard about his association with the Dacoits. 

Such is her loyalty to the Nawab that when Rivers informs her that he is bankrupt and is likely taking a cut from Tikuran's raids, Olivia dismisses the accusation as a slur. She frequently visits the palace to see Hamilton-Paul and the Nawab invariably joins them and he guides her away so they can be alone and he can justify himself to her as both a ruler and an abandoned husband. As they grow closer to each other, so do Anne and Inder Lal and, following a visit to the palace (which is now a tourist site), they sleep together and she becomes pregnant. 

This breach of etiquette echoes Olivia's transgression and Hamilton-Paul warns her to stop coming to see him because rumours are spreading about her relationship with the Nawab. He points out that she is being dishonoured by being entertained by eunuchs and by being kept away from the Begum (who spies on her every move), as she is deemed beneath her dignity. The servants have also started gossiping about Olivia and she gives them grist for the mill after she becomes the Nawab's mistress after he uses a drive into the country as an excuse to meet with the Dacoit leaders (and Olivia has a daydream about the massacre in the tent). 

Olivia also falls pregnant and breaks the news to Rivers and the Nawab, who insists that his son shall be born in the palace. He beams with pleasure at the prospect of humiliating the British and Olivia realises that he has been using her for his own ends. Yet, when Minnies and Crawford come to dinner, she is distressed when they discuss replacing him with a malleable nephew and incorporating his state into the Empire. Anne also feels conflicted and pays a call on Maji the midwife (Praveen Paul), who offers to massage her stomach to help bring about a miscarriage. But she decides to keep the child and leaves her hillside shack with a smile. She also puts on a brave face when she waves goodbye to Chid, who has fallen ill on the pilgrimage and agreed to fly back to the States. 

Hamilton-Paul and the Begum had joined forces to find Olivia a backstreet abortionist. But Saunders had recognised the twig method used and wasted no time in telling anyone who would listen that he knew she was a bad egg from the moment he laid eyes on her. Rivers is crushed by the news that Olivia has cuckolded him and sought sanctuary with the Nawab, but he throws himself into his work, while Olivia moved into a house in the snow-capped mountains bought for her by the Nawab. As Anne pays a pilgrimage, she imagines them together and the reflections of all three are caught in the same window. She had learned from Hamilton-Paul that the Nawab and his mother had moved to London to argue over his throne and the family jewels and that Olivia had stayed on alone after he had succumbed to a sudden heart attack. Now, Anne will have her baby in a monastery nearby and fulfil the destiny that had not befallen her great-aunt.

Although it dawdles in places and the modern story lacks the intensity of the flashback, this is a textbook piece of heritage cinema that confirmed Merchant-Ivory as the leading purveyors of period pieces in the Thatcher era. Given that Jhabvala's book was about the inequality that women had to endure in the 1980s, as well as in the past, this added irony makes the screenplay's simmering rage all the more relevant today, as so little has changed. It's fashionable to dismiss Merchant-Ivory as political film-makers, but don't be fooled by the refinement. As gay men who had experienced plenty of prejudice themselves, they were, for all the crinoline on display, astute and often acerbic commentators on the contemporary scene.

Barbara Lane's costumes are among the many plus points, along with Richard Robbins's score, Wilfred Shingleton's production design and Walter Lassally's cinematography (although criticism of his overuse of soft focus is hard to deny). But, while this looks magnificent, it's the intensity of the performances that fixes the attention. Approaching the peak of her powers as the doyenne of Anglo period pieces, Greta Scacchi makes Olivia as reckless as she is restless in failing to appreciate the wider picture in seeking to shake up the stuffy community in which she has been stranded. The contrast between the damage she causes and Anne's seemingly consequenceless adultery is striking, as she can choose to keep her child without causing an international incident (but we never get to know if she tells Inder Lal that he's going to be a father). This makes the casting of Julie Christie all the more shrewd, as she had been playing such free spirits since the early 1960s. 

The reunion with Merchant-Ivory stalwart Shashi Kapoor also makes perfect sense, as he ably conveys the cruelty behind the charm with a dash that is missing from the stuffed-shirted jobsworthiness of the British civil servants, who seem hopelessly out of their depth, while being utterly convinced of their own competence and rectitude. Kapoor's wife, Jennifer Kendal (who would die just two years latet at the age of 50), is also superb as the doctor's grieving wife, while Susan Fleetwood and Madhur Jaffrey go about being the power behind the throne in amusingly different ways. But the great strength of this compelling drama is Jhabvala's understanding of India's transition from an imperial province to a non-aligned republic and she cleverly contrasts the prince and the bourgeois to sum up its mindset, while also using a self-deceiving hippie to examine her own relationship with her adoptive homeland.

Arriving in the slipstream of David Blair's Hurricane, Denis Delic's 303 Squadron commemorates the achievements of the Polish pilots who flew with the RAF during the Second World War. Adapted from a bestselling book by Arkady Fiedler (who had witnessed the unit in action at RAF Northolt ), this is a well-intentioned tribute that sticks to historical fact with a little more rigour than its competitor. 

In the summer of 1940, as Winston Churchill broadcasts to the nation on the eve of the Battle of Britain and Herman Goering (Jacek Samojlowicz) tours airfields in the Pas-de-Calais, a group of Polish pilots based at RAF Northolt becomes frustrated because they are being restricted to training flights while homegrown rookies are being sent to confront the Luftwaffe with only 10 hours of flying time under their belts. Jan 'Donald' Zumbach (Maciej Zakoscielny) masks his annoyance by flirting with the nurses during one of the many medical check-ups. But when RAF johnnies Ronald Kellet (Nik Goldman) and John Kent (Marcin Kwasny) tool up in a flashy car and challenge Zumbach to fly a Hurricane, he not only outfoxes a Messerschmitt over the coast, but he also buzzes the toffs before landing and pretending to doze off nonchalantly in his deckchair. 

Reprimanded for insubordination by Stanley Vincent (John Kay Steel), Zumbach thinks back to when he was training at Deblin and joining pals Witold 'Tolo' Lokuciewski (Antoni Królikowski) and Jan Daszewski (Aleksander Wrobel) in flirting with pretty engineer Jagoda Kochan (Anna Prus). However, the Germans had invaded Poland on 1 September 1939 and the Soviet Union had launched its own attack on the country 16 days later. Zumbach was forced to leave Jagoda behind in order to fly a shiny blue bi-plane to neutral Romania and, while he was making his way to Blighty, his beloved was being arrested by the Nazis. 

Following a training flight on 30 August, when the Poles again face down enemy planes, the RAF top brass accept the recommendation of intelligence wonk Thomas Jones (Andrew Woodall) to use Polish pilots as cannon fodder while British chaps are trained up in the hope they can buy time before the Americans enter the war. Witold Urbanowicz (Piotr Adamczyk) is summoned to Whitehall to be informed that 303 Squadron is now operational and he assures his superiors that his men are the best pilots anywhere in the world. 

Urbanowicz gives his charges a rousing speech on the night before their first patrol and they acquit themselves admirably in combat. One German ace returns to base cursing that the Poles are back in the air, while the pompous Vincent informs Jones that it's his belief the Poles are trying to take the credit for kills made by Kent and Kellett. However, when he flies with them and they save his life, he recognises their talent and urges Jones to publicise their heroics in the media. 

To that end, he dispatches actress in uniform Victoria Brown (Cara Theobold) to Northolt to get to know the Poles and she dances with Zumbach in the mess. Indeed, they end the evening crashed out on her bed and he flashes back to Baden in 1938, when he had been dancing to the same tune with Jagoda at a function with her engineer father (Robert Czebotar) and Urbanowicz. He bumps into Wilhelm von Rüttenberg (Steffen Mennekes), a German flying ace he had befriended while competing in air speed races. However, he is accompanied by aide Johann Behr (Piotr Witkowski), who is a priggish Party zealot who jumps to his feet to sing `The Horst Wessel Song' when some Hitlerjunge barge into the function room. 

A cut-back to the present shows Victoria being put out when Zumbach comes to see Jones to ask if he can find out what happened to Jagoda. They speak in French because the English that was good enough to seduce Victoria is lacking when it comes to addressing an officer about something important. Nevertheless, they dance together at a shindig at the Orchard pub, which sees snooty officer Athol Forbes (Kirk Barker) beg Zumbach's forgiveness for treating him like a cad. This camaraderie is contrasted with a sniping exchange between Von Rüttenberg and Behr about Adolf Hitler and his cronies taking all the headlines and the credit for the deeds performed by their faceless forces. As this showdown takes place in a Paris casino, it is interrupted by the arrival of some Can-Can dancers who make Behr smiles when they reveal their bare bottoms. 

Having tumbled into bed with Victoria, Zumbach has to cycle back to the airfield to join his patrol. But Urbanowicz directs his ire at During Josef Frantisek (Maciej Cymorek) for repeatedly flying with his radio off and acting on his own initiative. However, it's Arsen Cerbrzynski and Stefan Wójtowicz (Antoni Salaj) who become the 303's first casualties and, following a rendition of the national anthem, their brothers in arms dance without music with their dinner companions in their memory.  

On 15 September, the Poles fly to avenge their friends. But Zumbach's determination to do his duty prompts him to reject Victoria's efforts to get him transferred to a training post and she breaks up with him. As he turns away, Jones arrives with letters from Jagoda, who is bearing up and waiting for the clouds to clear. Meanwhile, in Calais, Von Rüttenberg hopes that the badly wounded Behr has learned his lesson when he receives a gramophone record from Goering denouncing the Luftwaffe for losing the Battle of Britain because they lacked the spirit of the Allied pilots. 

By contrast, an awed (and unstuttering) King George VI (Jamie Hinde) visits Northolt on 26 September and praises the 303 to the skies, as he discovers the melting pot origins of the pilots and jokes that he is beginning to feel a little Polish himself. He even holds on to a pet dog when the squadron scrambles and he coos at their prowess as they join their RAF buddies in shouting `tally ho!' before engaging the enemy. A cut hurtles us forward five years to coloured archive footage of VE Day before a closing caption informs us that, during the Battle of Britain, the 303 claimed 126 German planes while only losing eight pilots. 

In a nice touch, the leads are credited alongside snapshots of their characters. However, Ludwig Paszkiewicz (Jan Wieczorkowski), Miroslaw 'Ox' Feric (Krzysztof Kwiatkowski), Stanislaw Karubin (Nikodem Rozbicki), Zdzislaw Henneberg (Waclaw Warchol) and Kazimierz Wunsche (Hubert Milikowski) have been such ciphers that it rather feels like tokenism to accord them this honour. Indeed, the wafer thin characterisation does much to undermine this sincere commendation of the 303 Squadron and its sacrifices, as only Zumbach has anything like a backstory and this marks him out as something of a bounder, as he cheats on the sweetheart he left to face the music back home. But the cardboard cutout Nazis and the stiff-upper RAF types are even more skeletally stereotypical and the only ring of Blighty authenticity comes from Marian Zawalinski's production design and Malgorzata Skorupa's costumes.

The scattershot scripting by Krzysztof Burdza, Tomasz Kepski and Zdzislaw Samojlowicz is also a major weakness, with the flashbacks to pre-war Poland being particularly clumsy. The shot of Zumbach and Jagda snogging in a plane parked beside a sun-dappled lake is risibly twee. Yet it almost feels grittily socially realistic compared to the Baden sequence (which has been stolen from Leslie Howard's The First of the Few, 1942), in which heiling Nazis pop up out of the woodwork to turn a joyous occasion into an arch demonstration of their humourless fanaticism.

Despite the best efforts of effects creator Artur Borowiec and sound designer Bartosz Putkiewicz, the computer-generated combat sequences also creak loudly, as they owe more to Tony Scott's Top Gun (1986) than Jan Sverak's homage to the Czechoslovakian pilots who flew with the RAF, Dark Blue World (2001). The jittery editing means that everything happens so quickly that there is never any ebb or flow to the dogfights and it's only the reassuring boom of Lukasz Pieprzyk's chest-thumping score that reassures the audience that `our boys' are winning. Naturally, all sorts of liberties are taken with the facts in the name of dramatic licence and such tweaking can be forgiven. But it's a shame that such an earnest and honourable project should so riddled with faults and lose its bearings after Zumbach becomes distracted by an entirely fictitious popsy from the ministry.

Sixty-six years have passed since Joseph Stalin was found on the bedroom floor of his dacha in Kuntsevo. The demise of the Man of Steel has been the subject of two recent features, Marc Dugain's An Ordinary Execution (2010) and Armando Iannucci's The Death of Stalin (2017). But the most riveting reconstruction of the dictator's final hours remains Alexei German's Khrustalyov, My Car! (1998), which is now available on disc after being given an unexpected cinematic outing to mark its 20th anniversary.

Seven years in the making and scripted by German and wife Svetlana Karmalita from a combination of dissident poet Joseph Brodsky's short story, `In a Room and a Half', and their own recollections as the respective children of a famous novelist and a feared theatre critic, this is a notoriously impenetrable picture that demands the audience's full attention, as well as a working knowledge of 20th-century Russian history. Yet, two decades after it was completed, this delirious and chillingly brutal satire feels more relevant than ever as a study of the paralysis and paranoia that accrue as a result of the misuse of untrammelled power. 

As the action opens on 28 February 1953, a monochrome Moscow is covered in snow and the lights illuminating the buildings on a quiet street glimmer in the darkness. Leaving through a large iron gate, a boiler repairman (Aleksandr Bashirov) creates sparks when he opens a fuse box. But he seems unconcerned, as he tosses his hat into the air and mumbles to himself as he crunches his way along the pavement. When he pauses to inspect a parked car, however, he is grab by the trenchcoated KGB men who emerge from the vehicle and he is carried into the grounds of an imposing edifice and deposited in a small hut. 

The Soviet Union is in the grips of the so-called `Doctors' Plot', as Joseph Stalin (Ali Misirov) seeks to purge the Jewish medics he is convinced are trying to poison the members of his inner circle. Everyone is afraid, but General Yuri Georgievich Klensky (Yuri Tsurilo) is too drunk to care. He trudges home to the crowded apartment he shares with his wife (Nina Ruslanova), mother (Paulina Myasnikova), sister (Genrietta Yanovskaya) and son (Mikhail Dementyev). 

With his shaven head and large moustache, Klensky cuts something of a dash and he is feared by the doctors at his clinic and fawned over by the nurse who attends to his voracious sexual needs. Brandishing a hunting horn and requiring an axe to break down the doors in one part of the hospital, Klensky conducts his rounds. He is taken aback to discover a lookalike (Ivan Matskevich) being prepared for an enema, as he suspects that his Red Army rank and status as one of the country's leading brain surgeons won't protect him from the secret police. Moreover, he is spooked when a foreign reporter (Jüri Järvet, Jr.) turns up on his doorstep with news of his exiled sister. Knowing that tenement snoop Sonia (Nijole Narmontaite) is eavesdropping, Klensky berates the stranger and accuses him of trying to besmirch his reputation. 

But, while the journalist is picked up by the KGB as he leaves the building, Klensky is afraid that he has been implicated in the Doctors' Plot and he plunges into the basement to pick his way through bric-a-brac that includes military uniforms and vehicles and clamber over the wall into the street. Peering through the darkness, he watches the arrival of the plainclothes cops and scurries away to seek sanctuary with teacher (Olga Samoshina). She tries to resist his advances and they wind up huddled in a creaking bed together, while the KGB invade his home and rifle through his belongings prior to forcibly evicting Klensky's family, who are relocated to an already overcrowded apartment filled with elderly Jews. 

Under the gaze of one of the Seven Sisters that Stalin commissioned to transform the Moscow skyline, a convoy of Black Marias sweeps along the empty boulevards, as citizens mill around in a state of organised confusion. Despite making his way into the countryside, Klensky is taunted by some boys at the railway station and they steal his boots before he is finally captured and bundled into the back of a van marked `Soviet Champagne'. In transit, Klensky is forced to perform fellatio on one of the guards before being raped. When the truck stops in the middle of a misty nowhere, he has his head held under the water of a frozen pond while he tries to drink and is mocked when he lowers his trousers to sit on the cooling snow to relieve the pain. 

Much to his astonishment, however, Klensky is singled out by another officer arriving in a stately car and is taken to a barrack to spruce himself up. Once again, he encounters his doppelgänger, as he is shown into a bathroom and told to hurry. Swept away in an official car, he arrives at Stalin's dacha to be met by police chief Lavrentiy Beria (Mulid Makoev). He is ushered into a bedroom, where the semi-conscious Stalin is lying in his own filth, as a distraught nurse struggles to keep him clean. Realising there is little he can do for the dying leader, Klensky massages his belly and Stalin breaks wind and foams at the mouth before expiring. Calling his bodyguard, Khrustalyov, to fetch his car, Beria beats a hasty retreat to Moscow, leaving a bemused Klensky to wander outside as a free man. 

As the film ends, the rehabilitated Klensky is working as a conductor on a train. Enjoying his modest power, he throws a passenger off the slowly moving locomotive and repairs to an open truck, where he balances a glass of wine on his bald head, while puffing on a cigarette and bellowing his relief and delight at having survived the Stalinist era. 

It will be six years in February since Alexei German passed away and his stock among cineastes has never been higher. He only completed five films after debuting with Grigori Aronov on The Seventh Companion (67), which examined the reasons for the Red Terror during the civil war of the early 1920s. Nominally working within the Socialist Realist tradition, he dared to question the wholehearted patriotism of his fellow countrymen during the Second World War, as he presented a quisling reinventing himself as a partisan hero in Trial on the Road (1971) and revealed how the exploits of a dead soldier were mythologised on celluloid in Twenty Days Without War (1977). But he created his masterpiece with My Friend Ivan Lapshin (1982), a Chekhovian chamber drama set in the provinces on the eve of the 1930s purges that took 13 years to produce and another three to pass through the censor's office.

His final outing, Hard to Be a God, took even longer to make, as permission to start shooting was withdrawn after Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1968. But, while German managed to begin work in 2000, he kept having to pause in order to raise funds and died before he could finish his devastating vision of a distant planet experiencing its own Middle Ages. Ultimately, his son (Alexei, Jr.) completed the project, which means that Khrustalyov, My Car! is German's last fully realised work.

After two decades of Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, it's dark warnings remain as potent as ever. But there are no easy symbols in a German film. Viewers have to keep their eyes open and use their intelligence and imagination to piece together the clues bestrewn around the mise-en-scène. For the most part, the dialogue feels less like the interaction between quotidian beings than the exchange of coded messages between participants in a conspiratorial allegory. But, while it's not always possible to read between the tightly packed lines, the main narrative is relatively straightforward, as Yuri Tsurilo's Blimpish doctor falls from grace and clambers back from the gulag to carve a new niche in a society in which dread has been replaced by mere trepidation. 

Buffeted by events over which he has no control, Tsurilo excels as a character based loosely on Yakov Rapoport, one of the Kremlin physicians who had been arrested during the Doctors' Plot and was coerced into ministering to the dying Stalin. The supporting ensemble also impresses, as they seem to inhabit the cockeyed world created by German rather than act out roles. Similarly, production designers Mikhail Gerasimov, Georgiy Kropachyov and Vladimir Svetozarov recapture a sense of time and place with the collaboration of costumier Ekaterina Shapkayts and cinematographer Vladimir Ilin, whose lighting of the high-contrast monochrome imagery and fluent camerawork keeps the audience at the centre of situations that often seem about to lapse into absurdism, as though Federico Fellini, Spike Milligan and Emir Kusturica had joined forces on a script for Andrei Tarkovsky. 

Even those au fait with the intricacies of Cold War Soviet politics will miss some of the allusions on a first viewing, as there is so much to take in. Indeed, one hopes that Arrow have plans to release this on disc, as it is indisputably one of the finest films produced in Russia since the collapse of Communism and should be every bit as well known as Nikita Mikhalkov's Oscar-winning insight into the ending of an era, Burnt By the Sun (1994).