![]() "I hope it's good news and not bad news," said Roland Tolmatchoff. Some of his trusted family and friends speak of the last moments of his life in the small town of Rolle, Switzerland.Īt the end of the summer, the voice of Anne-Marie Miéville, Jean-Luc Godard's wife, sounded at the other end of the landline. He organized his death by assisted suicide, as authorized by Swiss law. Long ReadLast summer, aged 91, the film director decided that his time had come. Opens at the Varsity theatre, Friday, March 16.Jean-Luc Godard's final days By Ariane Chemin Published on December 7, 2022, at 12:00 am (Paris), updated on December 7, 2022, at 9:18 am Starring Steve Buscemi, Jeffrey Tambor and Simon Russell Beale. Directed and co-written by Armando Iannucci. But if we are to understand history’s monsters, better to be faithful to the often banal motivations behind them (and to the amoral careerism that sees people abet them).Īnd what better way to kill a monster than to laugh at it? There may be a case to be made that the horrific reality that was Stalin’s Russia is unseemly as fodder for comedy. I don't like this mood.”Īlso introduced late is Jason Isaacs, as the self-important war hero Marshal Zhukov, whose character is the final piece tying together one of the 20th Century’s most infamous acts of homicidal betrayal that set the course of the Soviet Union for the next quarter century. When he has to deliver his eulogy, he says, “I’m sober. ![]() Ditto.Īs the designated clown in the piece (he’d been put in charge of the Russian hockey team, who were killed in a plane crash), Vasily gets some of the funniest lines. When Comrade Stalin does breathe his last, new characters enter the scene, including the demanding daughter Svetlana Stalin ( Andrea Riseborough) whom the others want to usher out of the country post-haste, and her brother, the drunken wastrel Vasily ( Rupert Friend). At a dinner, when Malenkov kills the good mood by referring jovially to a comrade who’d been executed, he says, dolefully, “I can’t remember who’s alive and who isn’t.” ![]() That’s the level of darkness in which The Death of Stalin revels. One problem: Most of the best doctors in Moscow have been executed or imprisoned. We later meet the terrified suspected traitor Molotov ( Monty Python's Michael Palin), who’s been busy renouncing his wife to save himself. Soon the others arrive to fret and procrastinate, including Khrushchev, Malenkov, Kaganovich ( Dermot Crowley), Mikoyan ( Paul Whitehouse), and Bulganin ( Paul Chahidi). The next day, his soiled body is finally discovered, still-breathing, by a parade of his lieutenants, first among them the brutal Beria ( Simon Russell Beale), the chief of the KGB predecessor NKVD, clearly portrayed here as a killer and rapist of women political prisoners. While listening to the desperately-produced recording, Stalin suffers a stroke in a room no one dare enter unbidden (again, on pain of death). Which means the performers and audience are prevented from leaving and the entire thing must be repeated on pain of death. Except it’s already just happened and it wasn’t recorded. The Death of Stalin does indeed live up to its title, but not before a 20-minute comic act-of-fear, in which Stalin ( Adrian McLoughlin) informs the technical director of a Mozart concerto that he wants a recording of that night’s performance ASAP. It’s a brilliant directorial choice, since it accentuates the idea that the craven self-interest on display is universal and relatable and not just a “Russian thing.” Which means we get Steve Buscemi as Nikita Khrushchev sounding exactly like Steve Buscemi, and Jeffrey Tambor (pre-#MeToo blacklisting), as Stalin’s ineffectual nominal successor Georgy Malenkov who sounds exactly like Jeffrey Tambor. You know, the one that wasn't Hitler?Ĭontributing to the theatre-of-the-absurdism of it all, no one is required to put on a phony Russian accent. If In The Loop was a drive-by shooting at Iraq War politics, The Death of Stalin is a head on assault on history, a parade of comic blowhards all jockeying for position after the death of that other great tyrant of the 20th Century. ![]() The movie, with James Gandolfini and Veep’s Anna Chlumsky, was nominated for a writing Oscar. The Thick of It would have only ever been seen by Britons if it weren’t spun off into the screamingly-funny In The Loop, a movie clearly but not literally about the fumbling between Bush’s White House and Blair’s Downing Street over the invasion of Iraq.
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