Fairytale (2022)
- Reviewed at the 2022 Locarno Film Festival.
Alexander Sokurov has a love/hate relationship with dictators. They have been the subject of a trilogy of biopics by the Russian director, with Moloch (1998) taking on Hitler, Taurus (2001) depicting Lenin’s final days, and The Sun (2005) looking at Emperor Hirohito’s decline. In his latest film, Fairytale, Sokurov presents a veritable smorgasbord of tyrants as Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini meander through a purgatory of ghostly archive footage. Winston Churchill is part of their number; whether this is guilt by association (“we were evil allies,” he mutters about his alliance with Stalin) or simply down to being a tyrant himself (particularly in the context of the British Empire) is open to question. Napoleon Bonaparte wanders through the mists to proffer compliments on haircuts and hand out grenades, and Jesus Christ makes an appearance, apparently reluctant to return to Heaven and the father who sent him to the cross.
The dictators all appear as themselves in ‘deep fake’ archival footage. The images are like ghosts; sometimes, one of these ghosts will perform an action, such as stroking the face of an adoring but invisible member of the crowd, or lifting an invisible cigar. Hitler is voiced by Lothar Deeg and Tim Ettelt, Stalin by Vakhtang Kuchava, Mussolini by Fabio Mastrangelo, and Churchill by Alexander Sagabashi and Michael Gibson, each in the dictator’s respective languages. Bonaparte is blurrily portrayed by Pascal Slivansky, while Christ appears in familiar painted form, speaking Aramaic (voice actor uncredited).
In James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus remarks histrionically that history is “a nightmare from which I am trying to awake”. Sokurov takes the idea literally. A sleeping head is viewed before we see a familiar sight: the corpse of Stalin lying in state. But this time Stalin wakes up and, badgered by Churchill, heads out – stopping only to berate Christ, who is lying on his bed and moaning, “Everything hurts. I’m in pain.” Soon, each of the dictators multiplies – Hitler is seen variously as a trench coat-wearing civilian, as the Reich Chancellor, and as a younger man – and refers to the different versions of himself as “brothers”. The autocrats indulge in petty complaints: Stalin has a runny nose, or “the snots” as Hitler calls them, and smells of sheep; everyone mocks Mussolini’s trousers. Then there are the not-so-petty complaints. Hitler regrets not marrying Wagner’s niece or burning London to the ground. If this is purgatory, no one has much appetite for redemption. Mussolini quotes Dante and claims to be Lenin’s favourite.
They bicker, and chide each other; Churchill is the most conciliatory, at one point even consoling Hitler. Meanwhile, they all meander towards a gate that may or may not lead to Heaven. Giant otherworldly legs move, glimpsed in the gap. But as in a Samuel Beckett play, our protagonists must wait. “Everything will be forgotten and start over,” someone laments in a line that might’ve been cut from Waiting for Godot. Meanwhile, the dictators re-enact their demagoguery to a blurred mass of shrieking faces, a crowd that becomes a sea and then a blood-dimmed tide in the film’s only use of colour.
Sokurov elides the possible contemporary parallels; Vladimir Putin is too 4K for this world of grainy black and white, when despots wore uniforms designed by Hugo Boss. There’s an almost affectionate nostalgia for these resurrected autocrats, to the point where the director’s strategy is unclear. We see these mass-murderers use urinals – Adolf can even be spotted doing a number two – but does this humanise them or belittle them? Pathetically, Mussolini glimpses his and his mistress’s beaten, disfigured bodies in a pile of corpses. But he learns nothing, and the sight has no redemptive power. Their only regret is not the mass murder itself but that the murder wasn’t massive enough. Stalin ruefully opines: “We didn’t have enough time to shoot them all.”
Ultimately, Sokurov’s traumfilm is as bewildering as a nightmare. It’s more a situation than a story, and even at 78 minutes it feels long. If there is a punishment for the dictators – as insufficient as it finally feels, especially given that their victims appear as mere blurs – it is that they are damned to repeat their actions and never escape their pathologies. On film, at least, this is their fate: they will never awake from the nightmare of history.