Free Waiting for the Barbarians by Daniel Mendelsohn Page B

official history, as well as the tableaux showing us what we could call unofficial history, are punctuated by the jarringly surreal moments that give the movie its dreamlike quality. A woman on the perilous boundary between middle and old age gesticulates suggestively before a painting of a voluptuous odalisque; that blind woman gives a sensitive account of a number of works of art to a visitor who can see; a pair of handsome modern-day sailors sniff intently at an oil painting after Custine has remarked onits wonderful smell. (Sokurov’s camera tends to linger on the faces of pretty young men, as much in his several documentaries about soldiers as in his narrative films. In one eerily memorable scene in
Russian Ark
, Custine looms over a handsome, cowering youth in a corner of a gallery, wordlessly threatening him—with what, it’s not quite possible to know.)
    Indeed, the two most beautiful images in this movie of so many beautiful images seem to have no apparent meaning at all. In the first, a plump and elderly Catherine II escapes from a stifling room—she’s been showing some children how to curtsey—and runs into a snow-covered courtyard; the camera follows her as she runs, with increasing speed, through a path in the snow, her gray satin train trailing behind her, a wordless shot that lasts an uncannily long time. (Sokurov likes to dwell at unnatural length on certain images, a technique that at once induces reverie and focuses attention.) In the second, at the end of the movie, a stream of richly dressed courtiers—the ones from the Persian ceremony, apparently—stream down a magnificent ceremonial double staircase. The river of courtiers, Pushkin among them, keeps swelling, it seems, and the amazed camera, which is following them down the steps, keeps spinning back and up to capture the swirling movement of the people, the stairway itself, this moment.
    As these sumptuously attired characters begin to crowd and overwhelm the screen, the camera cuts away to a small, oddly glowing doorway. Beyond it, we see, is not the city of St. Petersburg but a white, icy ocean of some kind. This small moment, at last, explains the film’s title: for as we now see, we are indeed aboard an “ark”—a cinematic vessel that has rescued, “as best it could,” apparently random moments from history, and that will float forever in an endlessly circling stream of time itself.

    If
Russian Ark
offers tantalizing glimpses of people whom history has forgotten, as well as of men and women who seem very small and vulnerable in comparison to the roles they were required to play, then
The Sun
puts Sokurov’s special emphases to excellent use as it explores the gap between historical grandiosity and human weakness at a moment in history when that gulf was most glaringly exposed: the day on which Hirohito consented to acknowledge that he was not, in fact, a god.
    The film, like
Moloch
, uses the events of one day as the armature on which to build up a subtle account of the disproportion between a man and his historical persona. (
The Sun
also shares
Moloch
’s dour palette of washed-out browns, greens, and grays, in stark contrast to the opulent colors that enrich
Russian Ark
.) When it opens, we find Hirohito, now living in a bunker beneath his palace, at breakfast, being given his day’s agenda by his chamberlain. Nothing is left to chance: after his ten o’clock meeting with his military cabinet and his noon visit to his lab (the late emperor, now technically known as Shôwa, was an accomplished marine biologist with a number of scholarly publications to his name), he is informed when he may nap and when he may have time for “private thoughts.” This is a man who, it seems, is unable to function on his own, outside of the structure of court life—a point that is wonderfully made toward the end of the film when, as he leaves a meeting with General MacArthur, he confronts for the first time a door that isn’t being opened for