Khrustalyov, my Car!

Synopsis

"The time is 1953, the place is Moscow; the Jewish purges are still on, and Stalin is on his deathbed. When General Yuri Glinsky, a military surgeon, tries to escape, he is abducted, taken to the lowest rungs of hell, and deposited at the heart of the enigma. Alexei Guerman’s deeply personal penultimate film is a work of solid and constant disorientation, masterfully orchestrated. Enigmatic phrases, sounds, gestures, and micro-events pass before our eyes and ears before we or the alternately jumpy and exhausted characters can make sense of them. Guerman’s lustrous black and white images and meticulously constructed soundscape are permeated with the feel of life in a totalitarian society, where something monumental is underway but no one knows precisely what or when or how it will break." – Film Society of Lincoln Center

"“Khrustalyov, my car!” is supposedly the excited cry for his chauffeur uttered by the infamous Soviet security chief Beria as he hurried from Stalin’s deathbed. Guerman’s film is a feverish, frantic evocation of Moscow in January 1953 as Stalin lay dying. Consistent with Guerman’s habit of observing history indirectly, Khrustalyov, my Car! follows the itinerary of a surgeon whose life, and that of his family, is thrown into turmoil by the infamous “Doctor's Plot,” in which a group of predominately Jewish Moscow doctors were fingered as members of a conspiracy to assassinate Soviet leaders. Guerman creates a consistently amazing visual and aural rendition of the charged atmosphere of those sad times, in which no point of view is ever fixed, no shadow devoid of possible danger, nor any stray remark free from potentially lethal consequences." – Harvard Film Archive