On any level it’s difficult to know what to do with master director Alexander Sokurov’s Fairytale, a mesmeric, opaque purgatorial fantasy that’s all too convinced of its genius. Far more art installation than festival feature, the film imagines Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and Churchill in a Piranesi and Gustave Doré-inspired underworld, arguing and obsessing as they wander near the gates of heaven and go into frenzies before mass crowds that clamor and sway like giant waves. Made using deep fake technology (the figures are digitally animated from photos and historic footage while the voices are dubbed by different actors), Fairytale would succeed far better if experienced in a sensorial, immersive way in a gallery space rather than a cinema, where its lack of narrative and semi-numbing chatter make the 78-minute running time feel far too long.
The pity is that Fairytale could work splendidly in another setting, but the notoriously prickly Sokurov clearly has other notions: he’s derided Cannes for not accepting the film (Russian news agency Tass reported the director saying the festival is “afraid to show such things”) and claimed that Venice rejected it because of Russian production money (likely true). Locarno accepted, but putting it in the international competition rather than a special screenings slot does no one any favors. Nor does the lack of a pressbook: only Sokurov’s Russian-based company Intonations is on the print though the festival catalog lists it as a Belgian-Russian coproduction, and the lack of information for such a dense, disorienting work is frustrating given that the visual artistry involved is impressive by any standard. What it all means, however, remains unclear, and one has the sneaking suspicion that were the director to elucidate us, his explanation would be far less profound than he believes.
None of which takes away from the graphic beauty of what’s on screen, which frequently recalls not just the work of the master engravers cited above but also that paragon of turgid English Romanticism, John Martin, whose expansive canvases noisily burst with swirling skies and heaving masses on the brink of apocalypse. The one explanatory sentence given out by the production company is that the film is designed as a “civil and artistic statement about those who determined the fate of the planet,” though that’s not all that helpful apart from clarifying why the unquestionably flawed Churchill is grouped together with those three monsters (one suspects Mao isn’t included because Sokurov’s interests, pace The Sun, don’t extend beyond Europe).
The setting is Limbo, where one of the multiplied Stalins – all the leaders come in multiples, like a gift pack – berates Jesus in the tomb for being an idler, seconded by Hitler who yells at him to get to work. Stalin quotes from the first line of Dante’s Inferno (why Stalin?), Hitler wonders whether it would have been better to have hooked up with Wagner’s niece rather than Eva Braun, Churchill mumbles occasionally about the Queen, and Mussolini wanders about as his usual pompous self; sadly it’s doubtful Sokurov means to draw any parallel between a shirtless Mussolini and Vladimir Putin’s penchant for displaying his own manly torso. If there’s any “civil statement” here, it’s the banal egotism of world leaders in times of war; while it’s true that Churchill – and Roosevelt – allowed Stalin to claim Eastern Europe for his empire, grouping this quartet together stretches moral equivocation beyond sustainability.
Despite these criticisms, there’s something undeniably fascinating about Sokurov’s infernal vision. His figures enter in and out of monumental two-and-three dimensional backdrops, their crumbling classicism mixed with colossal fascistic structures in a fevered imagining of the liminal spaces between Heaven and Hell. Each avatar, taken from iconic images, moves clumsily, chattering in their own language (sometimes unintelligibly), barely engaging with each other since to do so would diminish their need for self-glorification. Especially spectacular are sequences in which crowds roar and pitch to and fro in terrifying waves, their hypnotic rhythmic oscillations driving the dictators towards a frenzied apotheosis that makes one wonder whether it’s the leaders spurring on the masses or the other way around. Most of the images are b&w, beautifully sketched, intensely shaded and alive like 35mm with flickers and movement that belie its digital origins. Experiencing it in a gallery, perhaps projected on multiple walls, could potentially be electrifyingly disturbing and would likely generate the kind of response Sokurov desires, but on a cinema screen it becomes too difficult to enter inside, and while Fairytale isn’t interminable like his Faust, it offers no new perspectives on the director’s decades-long investigation into the corrosiveness of power.
Director: Alexander Sokurov
Screenplay: Alexander Sokurov
Producer: Nikolay Yankin
Executive producer: Natalia Smagina
Music: Murat Kabardokov
Sound: Alexander Vanyukov
Production company: Intonations (Russia)
Venue: Locarno (International competition)
In Georgian, German, Italian, English, French
78 minutes
