Fairytale (Aleksandr Sokurov, 2022) (Patreon)

Aleksandr Sokurov is a director typically perceived as having a distinctive style, a brand even. The work is thought of as being ponderous, grim, even a bit self-important. And while this may be the case for a number of his films, Sokurov actually has a lot of variety in his filmography. Spiritual Voices, to take one example, is indeed slow and serious. But it is also a landmark work of video art, a piece that uses the particular technical aspects of analog video for a smeary, narcotic effect. It is an epic about waiting, about going to the desert for an ostensible mission but finding yourself lost and directionless. Other Sokurov works, including some of his best known films -- Russian Ark, The Sun, Alexandra -- employ innovative camerawork, unexpected tonal shifts, and even a fair bit of humor. In other words, not everything is Second Circle, a film I once described as getting an eyeball full of iron slag.

So the fact that Fairytale is essentially a work of animation should not in itself be surprising. But it is a surprise, a confounding but ultimately rewarding one. In sculpting a haptic vision of the boundary between heaven and hell, Sokurov has made a sharp turn into the avant-garde, much like Kiarostami's 24 Frames or Godard's turn to digital collage. In its visual style, rhythms, and atemporal drift, Fairytale very much resembles the work of American animator Lawrence Jordan, best known for films like 1965's Gymnopedies and 1968's Our Lady of the Sphere. Like the collage-novels of Max Ernst, Jordan uses the raw material of printed ink drawings, mostly from turn-of-the-century "penny dreadfuls," to produce a universe suspended between representation and abstraction.

Within this environment, Sokurov has staged a kind of Samuel Beckett limbo for the leaders and despots of the 20th century. He is returning to well-trod ground, as some of his favored subjects (Hitler, Stalin) rub shoulders with newer cast members (Churchill, Mussolini, Napoelon, and Christ). Inasmuch as Fairytale received a reception following its Locarn debut, it has mostly focused on Sokurov's application of deep-fake imaging technology. Using available images of the various dead heads of state, Sokurov moves them around in his digitized hellscape, manipulating their faces and mouths so they appear to speak the lines of his script. 

While this use of cutting-edge computer work is certainly impressive from a 71-year-old veteran director, to call Fairytale a "deep fake film" is misleading. Sokurov  hasn't produced anything like this. The mouth movements in this film are really more like the old Clutch Cargo cartoons; there is an obvious disconnect between lips and faces that generates an impression more uncanny than realistic. This is in keeping with the unexplained proliferation of multiples in Fairytale, with Hitler or Churchill walking around with so-called "brothers." The temporal dislocation of words and bodies, and the endless division of identities, work in tandem with Sokurov's repetitive dialogue and narrative stasis, to depict a netherworld that exists outside of time and history.

As far as the broader themes of Fairytale, they are fairly self-evident, much like the children's stories alluded to by the title. The past is more than another country for Sokurov. It's a suspension in formaldehyde, a nonlinear pageant of dead souls struggling to adjust to the powerlessness of eternity. Each of the leaders pleads in turn to be let through the gates of heaven, a move that recalls Kafka's "Before the Law." But eventually it is unclear whether heaven, limbo, and hell are separate places or just vague attitudes that shift around these men like weather conditions.

In the closest thing Fairytale offers to a narrative climax, the multiple iterations of the four leaders find themselves atop a colossal Romanesque ruin, an Albert Speer edifice with exposed plumbing and a crumbling grandstand. From here, the men address "the people," a swarming gray mass that roils like an ocean made from heads and bodies. It looks like a charcoal drawing by William Kentridge, an undulating herd of bodies indistinguishable from the great abyss. This mass serves as the four men's last temptation, their final taste of earthly stature. And it appears they may spend eternity vainly appealing to this collective body, trying to hold sway in a place that is beyond power or ambition. Sokurov leaves it at that, knowing that in the end, there is no heaven or hell, only history.