Free Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn

future but nobody remembers the past,” he grumbles at one point—is sternly reminded by the twentieth-century narrator that “monarchy isn’t eternal,” the marquis playfully replies, “Don’t I have the right to dream a little?” To which the narrator, just as playfully but with a certain pointedness too, retorts: “Dream away!”
    This tart acknowledgment that there is a gulf between dreams (Custine’s, and the film’s, willful decision to look only at the imperial past) and reality (that past is irretrievably lost) is an important reminder that Sokurov’s dreams are more than soft and “poetic” reveries, pretty pictures meant to evoke pleasant nostalgia. As with dreams, his images and narratives always suggest other, hidden truths: thesesurfaces invite, even require, interpretation. The way the young man in
Mother and Son
keeps looking at a plume of smoke from a train that keeps mysteriously passing, the way the director constantly bends and stretches certain other images, suggest that the emotions in play here are a good deal more complex, and a good deal darker, than the ideal love that some critics see as the movie’s subject.
    Sokurov’s penchant for turning away from our waking understanding of our lives in favor of the truths that reverie can reveal is even more important for certain of his films that have larger perspectives, and larger ambitions. These films include not only his masterpiece,
Russian Ark
, with its poignant exploration of historical nostalgia, but also
Moloch
(1999), a fantasy that follows Hitler, Eva Braun, and some guests during a day’s retreat at Berchtesgaden, and
Taurus
(2001), an eccentrically imaginative reconstruction of Lenin’s last days—the first two installments of a planned tetralogy about twentieth-century autocrats, of which
The Sun
, about Hirohito’s last day as a god, is the third. (Released abroad in 2005, it had its US premiere only at the end of 2009.) It is the profoundest and aesthetically the most satisfying of his excursions into biography, films in which his preoccupation with dreams serves what may be his real interest: history.
    Or, rather, a very specific facet of history. At a showing of
The Sun
at the Berlin Film Festival, Sokurov declared that he is not interested in the “events or the period” when he makes a historical movie. The facts of history are not what he wants to evoke: these correspond to the waking reality for which, in so many films, he has shown little interest.
    Instead, he explained—and this is hardly surprising in someone who came of age in the stagnant final days of the Soviet regime—Sokurovis interested in exploring the gap that opens up between human realities and what he calls the “theater” of ideological performances. He elucidated this notion in Berlin when asked about
Moloch
, a movie whose effectiveness, in great part, derives from the contrasts between the awesome, fortress-like scale of the Berchtesgaden redoubt and the grandiosity of the ceremony that envelops Hitler and his party, on the one hand, and, on the other, the grotesque baseness of “Adi” and Eva’s antics—naked gymnastics on the balcony, slapstick kicks in the buttocks, impromptu wrestling matches, etc. “These people, the people of power, turned their lives into theater … subordinated their behavior to rituals and ceremonies,” the director said.
    Moloch
is haunted by this tension between impressive outward show and inner realities. One intimate scene between Eva and Adi begins in his bathroom with Eva noticing some stains on his dress uniform; “they come from the body,” the whiny, hypochondriacal Hitler mournfully observes. This telling reference to the difference between bodies and the clothes that cover them inspires the most pointed line in the movie: a moment later, Eva suddenly looks at her lover with disgust and says, “Without an audience, you’re no better than a corpse.” For Sokurov, a survivor of the Soviet