A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

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Tuesday, January 6, 2026

Limonov: The Ballad (Kirill Serebrennikov, 2024)

Ben Whishaw in Limonov: The Ballad

Cast: Ben Whishaw, Viktoria Miroshnichenko, Tomas Aran, Corado Invernizzi, Evgeniy Mironov, Andrey Burkovskiy, Masha Mashkova, Odin Lund Biron, Vladim Stepanov, Vladislav Tsenev, Sandrine Bonnaire. Screenplay: Pawel Pawlikowski, Ben Hopkins, Kirill Serebrennikov. Cinematography: Roman Vasyanov. Production design: Lyubov Korolkova, Vladslav Ogay. Film editing: Yuriy Karik. Music: Massimo Pupillo. 

I admit that I had never heard of Eduard Limonov before venturing into Kirill Serebrennikov's biopic, and even now I'm not sure why I should have. Poet, dissident, and madman, he stirred things up in the Soviet Union, New York, France, and again in the Russia that arose from the fall of the Soviet Union. Limonov: The Ballad puts him in the larger context of the madness of New York City in the 1970s and Russia in the 1990s, and to some extent makes him a representative figure for those troubled places and times. Despite an all-stops-out performance by Ben Whishaw and a vivid re-creation of those eras, the film lacks coherence. But maybe that's the point: Limonov himself lacked coherence.   

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