A premiere of “Dovlatov” film at the Berlin Film Festival. 6 days in the 70s life of a Soviet writer Sergei Dovlatov – Сергей Довлатов, an unknown to almost anyone in the USSR until it fell in 1991. And still largely unknown globally.
Unfortunately, not a single line of his prose is read, while as a viewer you waste 130 minutes of _your_ life watching bleak, aimless people critique each other’s writing or lack of action, getting drunk and smoking cigarettes.
The only positive thing I can say about this movie is the recreation of Joseph Brodsky’s voice… who does read some of his poetry.
Otherwise, utterly incomprehensible to someone born after 1990 or outside of the SovietUnion. The copious textual explanations on screen (literally pages of text) don’t help much.
A pale, overexposed attempt to copy the style of the director’s father, Aleksei German. Horrible sound mix, terrible camera work, horrendous lighting, fake makeup, non-believable set design, awkward dialogue, weak acting.
Boring, unnatural, ugly and pretentious beyond belief.
I’d be ashamed to send something like this to a film festival, let alone into theaters, then scamming people about a super-narrow 4-day viewing window to create an artificial scarcity, then widening the release to a few weeks.
Karma’s gonna get ya. And time will decide.
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