Karaul

Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are traveling on a train. Suddenly, the train stops. Stalin asks, "Why are we stopping?" The engineers ran out of coal. "Shoot the engineers!" The engineers were shot, and the train continues to be stationary. Khrushchev asks, "Why are we stopping?" "They shot the engineers." "Rehabilitate the engineers!" The engineers were rehabilitated, and the train continues to be stationary. Then Brezhnev stands up, pulls the curtains, and says, "What are you all doing? Let's pretend we're moving..." /// This film works great not only as a study of bullying in the military but also as – and it deserves applause precisely because it can do it through its main theme - a mirror of its time. The authors created a depressingly monotonous and isolated world of a military train, where time stopped and where endless movement towards an infinitely distant goal (the war will probably never end, the train will never reach the prison...) mirrors the motionless world outside, which long ago lost its utopian goal. And it is precisely through the views through the train window that the creators hid the main impressions of the transition between two epochs - the total decay of (not only ruling) values; apathy and rigidity, but which rather amounted to hypnotized waiting for the cataclysm, which nobody thought would come, but everyone knew that it would have to come; in extreme cases, an escape to new values (waiting for the apocalypse and a return of God, emphasizing the symbol of the cross, or nihilism in sex). The final passage says so much more than it could if we’d only stuck to the theme of bullying: there is no escape from the train. /// The chosen form perfectly corresponds to the content - the predominance of claustrophobic imitating details, a monochromatic image, and slow-paced transitions between shots, all giving birth to a feverish and unbearable timeless and surface rigidity, under which the catharsis of a new era is being born. (08.08.2015)