Andrey Rublyov (1966)

(Criterion Streaming, December 2019) I have a confession, dear readers: I dozed off somewhere in the third quarter of Andrey Rublyov and only woke up to the film’s final splashes of colour. I will not go back to see what I’ve missed. I regret nothing. I would do it again. I would encourage others not to do the same, but to doze off even earlier. OK, that may be overstating it. But still: As I develop this appreciation of classic cinema as a rough approximation of time travel, there’s the corollary that there are periods to which you really don’t want to go and medieval Russia is high on that list. Andrey Rublev, surprisingly enough for a Soviet film of the Cold War era, talks a lot about religion, faith and sacrifice—no wonder the film was not a favourite of the regime. (And no wonder, perhaps, if western film critics lionized Andrei Tarkovsky as a defiant gesture to the Soviets.)  While snippets of the film approach the ultimate parody of a European historical black-and-white art-house film, other moments show mayhem on an epic scale, with battle sequences involving hundreds of participants, horses and a very wide frame seen from above. Still, the film’s massive length (no less than three hours and 25 minutes) eventually got the best of me, especially since the battle sequences end up forming a comparatively small proportion of the film. While I liked the bell-making sequence, the rest of the film didn’t do it for me: the film’s ponderous rhythm, self-conscious dialogues and art-house aesthetics gradually sent me to sleep. I will not go back to see what I’ve missed. I regret nothing. I would do it again. I’m not the kind of viewer for which Andrey Rublyov was made, and I don’t care about how many best-movies-of-all-time lists include it as a top pick.