Khrustalev, My Car is about a mood. The ambience of a time! The fundamental mood of a time! 1953! The Doctors’ Plot against Stalin. When all the doctors were arrested as spies. As in the pay of the CIA or MI6. As undermining Soviet health.
Klensky’s head of a military hospital. He’s disgraced, for some reason. Toppled from power. He’s raped by convicts. In the back of a van. Children pelt him with stones. But he rises again. To tend to Stalin in his dacha deathbed. But Klensky can’t return to his old life. He abandons his family, his home …
Is that what happened? So it’s a redemption arc …
That bit where Klensky is raped in the back of the van. The bit where Klensky is beaten with sticks. Why? What’s it about?
We’re not supposed to know what’s happening. From what perspective it’s been told. What it all adds up to. What’s relevant and irrelevant.
No explanations, right? No establishing shots. It’s impossible to know who all the characters are, or what they have to say.
The camera stumbling about. Bits of voiceover, adding up to nothing.
You wait for a plot to get going, but there is none. Just one farcical situation after another. Just Gogol-style grotesquerie. Black humour …
And it’s all so ominous. It’s all as though descending. Violence everywhere. Senselessness in general. Paranoia. Hallucination! Delusion! Hysteria! It’s all hurly burly. It’s all pell-mell.
Inducing panic on the part of the viewer. What’s happening? What’s real and what’s dream? What’s meaningful and what’s meaningless? What’s necessary and what contingent? What’s it all about? How does it all fit together?
Grime! Sludge! Sweat! Swearing! Voice and noises coming from nowhere. Absurdity! Pell mell! Burlesque!
These aren’t films, they’re fevers.
A deranged, dislocated Russia. A mad Russia.
The communal apartment … the kommunalka … totally crowded, lacking in all privacy. That’s the key to it all …
In the fields of History. In the mire of History. In the quagmire of history. Swallowing everything up! The whole world!
Smoke. Coughing. Volleys of noise.
Dialogue drowned out. Our view blocked.
All these labyrinthine interiors.
Characters looking at the camera. Addressing it. Characters fucking the camera … that really happens.
The camera’s as bewildered as we are … The camera roving … Lost …
Sets bathed in shit. In piss. In sick. In viscera.
As though filmed with a hidden camera. As though it were found footage.
So immersive. Sensory overload madness. Like you’re being drowned in filth and horror …
The camera can never see properly. All this random shit dangled in front of it.
Claustrophobia. Overload. Overcrowding. Narrow alleyways. Smoke everywhere.
Randomers staring into the camera. Making faces into it. All these grotesque extras. Hideous!
Rain-battered streets. Mud on all surfaces. On the faces of the inhabitants. Streets thronged with peasants, soldiers, cretins.
No narration. No plot. Just some mad fucking pageant. Bustling, bristling. No pause. Just parades …
General sludge. Is it mud? Is it shit? Hard to tell.
Deep focus. Disorientation. People appearing, disappearing. Brooms, kettles in front of the lens, obstructing the view. Geese, goats, ducks, a monkey, swarms of flies, and human confusion in front of the lens. Dangling things: ropes, chains …
General violence. People being offed. A general whacked in the head with a spike. Entrails. Eyeballs.
The film doesn’t want to make sense! It refuses to make sense! It has better things to do than to make sense!
Each frame filled.
Squalor. Confusion. Contagion. Carnivalesque and then some. Grotesquerie. General putrefaction.
Long shots. Crowded interiors. Mad slobbery. Mumbling dialogue. Off screen voices, without source. Non sequitur conversations. ‘A scholar is not an enemy, the enemy is a scholar in doubt’. ‘You write books, but you have no thoughts’.
The idiot who holds a toilet seat around his face and declares it as a painting.
Work in Progress 