Event

TAURUS

(aka TELETS)
Dir. Alexander Sokurov, 2001.
94 min. Russia.
In Russian and German with English subtitles.

In the second installment of his then-trilogy, Sokurov targets the founding father of the Soviet Union, the man Victor Serge called "the brain of the revolution"Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. A marbled milkshake of iconoclasm and tender eulogy, TAURUS is "strangely neutral" (The Guardian) and manages to both ridicule and commiserate with its subject in his final days.

Once a human dynamo, Lenin (Leonid Mozgovoy) is now partially paralyzed by several strokes. His gothically foggy country estate at Gorky has become a bustling sanatorium where maids, physicians, and orderlies take turns humoring the now-aphasic revolutionary leader and clipping his toenails. Between rants about electricity and meditations on death and fate ("When I'm dead, the sun will still rise, the wind will still blow, and the foolish proletariat wills still battle against the bourgeois swine"), Lenin has his wife, the committed revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaya (Mariya Kuznetsova), read to him from a biography of Marx and a chronicle of feudal-era torture.

If nothing else, TAURUS is filled with lessons about both life-long interpersonal commitment and Russian history.Those primed by Sokurov's reputation for patience-testing tempos will be surprised by TAURUS' kinetic energy. Lenin's frequent tantrums, Sokurov's ever-moving camera (he shot this one himself), and the here-comes-trouble appearance of a scheming Stalin (Sergey Razhuk), along with the Dutch Masters look that Sokurov achieved by using plastic filters, make TAURUS both unexpectedly entertaining and visually beguiling. Between the poop-jokes and the "dim, soupy visuals" (The New York Times), TAURUS offers something for everyone.