Save and Protect (1989)

1989
November 13, 2021

Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin […]

Anna Karenina: Vronsky’s Story (2017)

2017

There is no single truth in love. Each treads their own path. Which should take precedence – passion or duty? How do we choose? And who gets to judge? These are the eternal questions, remorselessly thrust upon us by life. Anna Karenina made her choice, leaving her son Sergei to grow up struggling to understand why his mother took such a tragic and terrible path, and Count Vronsky haunted by the memory of the woman […]

Prorva (1992) aka Moscow Parade

1992
February 2, 2021

Set in 1930s Moscow. About an aristocratic woman married to a member of Josef Stalin’s secret police who embarks on an affair with a baggage handler. In this free-wheeling drama, dozens of little dramas center around an affair between the wife of an NKVD official and a baggage handler she has met. The woman, a former aristocrat, is relatively safe in Moscow in 1930, even though Joseph Stalin is running the country since she is […]