Fairy­tale – first-look review

It’s been sev­en years since we’ve been gift­ed new work from the Russ­ian titan Alexan­der Sokurov, known for his ethe­re­al, impres­sion­is­tic film­mak­ing style and his fas­ci­na­tion with the polit­i­cal tyrants of the 20^th cen­tu­ry. His lat­est, the iron­i­cal­ly named Fairy­tale, is a but­ton-push­ing minia­ture odd­i­ty that is, osten­si­bly, an ani­mat­ed movie which is one part Ter­ry Gilliam’s cut-n-paste Mon­ty Python inter­sti­tials, and one part col­lage-based social media satirist Cold War Steve.

We descend into a place referred to as ​“Par­adise”, with an orange hell­fire vis­i­ble in the mid­dle dis­tance. Yet all colour is quick­ly drained away and we’re forth­with entrenched in a pal­lid mono­chrome expanse that resem­bles the slopes of a crum­bling pyra­mid. The body of Josef Stal­in is seen lying in state, but then he begins to talk. He glances over to the body on the slab across the room. It’s Jesus, who engages the Com­mu­nist god­head in a com­i­cal­ly squeaky voice.

Then, while up and about, Stal­in bumps into his old pals Hitler, Mus­soli­ni and Churchill, and they amble and con­verse in a friend­ly man­ner that draws on obscure his­tor­i­cal reflec­tion, polit­i­cal in-jokes and with­er­ing char­ac­ter cri­tiques. All the while, a blurred sea of human onlook­ers pro­duce a col­lec­tive wail of pain (or is it sad­ness?) from the pit below, and our four­some act and speak in a way that is emo­tion­al­ly dis­en­gaged from them (ie, they are not address­ing the crowd, as all of them are famous for doing.)

By turns fun­ny, tedious, boor­ish, scat­o­log­i­cal and pro­found, Fairy­tale is like noth­ing else out there, par­tic­u­lar­ly on an aes­thet­ic lev­el. Sokurov and his team employ ele­ments of news­reel and archive footage and com­bine the human fig­ures with dig­i­tal deep­fake tech­nol­o­gy so as to give the impres­sion that the pro­tag­o­nists are engag­ing with one anoth­er. Often, this pro­duces a hor­rif­ic warped effect where, say, Hitler goes from bemoan­ing the fact that he wasn’t able to get togeth­er with Wagner’s niece, to being seen with his face appar­ent­ly melt­ing off.

The nar­ra­tive through­line here is thread­bare, and it would appear that only those with a detailed knowl­edge of 20^th cen­tu­ry total­i­tar­i­an­ism and its play­ers would real­ly get any sort of arc out of this daffy, drunk­en con­ver­sa­tion piece. Yet, some­how, the nov­el­ty of the inter­ac­tions and the almost lyri­cal direc­tion­less­ness of the con­ver­sa­tions man­ages to hold the atten­tion, large­ly through the fresh­ness and inno­va­tion of the visuals.

It’s dif­fi­cult to impose a func­tion on the film, as it does come across as sim­ply the apoth­e­o­sis of the Sokurov project, bring­ing togeth­er pet themes, his love of dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy, and a chance to fur­ther explore the psy­ches of some of mod­ern history’s most evil and influ­en­tial men. Churchill, is giv­en a heav­en­ly reprieve, yet there’s no sense the film­mak­er sees him as an inno­cent bystander to the atroc­i­ties of fas­cism and com­mu­nism. It’s easy to tag any­thing vague­ly psy­che­del­ic with the ​“head trip” label, but this jour­ney into the depths of the polit­i­cal beyond cer­tain­ly earns it, and then some.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, month­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.