satan in moscow
by Douglas Messerli
Barbara
Alberti, Amedeo Pagani, Aleksandar Petrović, and Roman Wingarten (writers,
based on the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov), Aleksandar Petrović (director) The Master and Margaret / 1972
When
I first received this film on Netflix, I was somewhat peeved by the Anglicizing
of the film’s title. The Russian novel, which I had read decades earlier, was
translated as The Master and Margarita; the Serbo-Croatian title of Petrović’s Yugoslav production was Maestro i Margarita, and the Italian title, the language in which
the cinema was filmed, read Il maestro e
Margherita.
Why, therefore, did we have to describe the English-language version as
Margaret? But after seeing the film, and realizing that there have been some
dozen other adaptations of Bulgakov’s great fiction, I now feel it is quite
appropriate to call this, only tangentially related version, by its
American-sounding monniker.
Add
to this the Master’s recent acquaintance with a beautiful woman, Margaret
Nikolajevna (Mimsy Farmer), who seems only to ready to give herself up to the
Master, and who admits upon her second visit his apartment, that she has been “stalking”
him for some time because of his troubled appearance, and that she is the wife
of the Chief of Police, and the viewers themselves become a bit paranoid. Is
she also spying of the Master—or, as we later see her in the company of
Woland—in league with the devil himself.
Woland, meanwhile, turns the tables on
some of the bureaucratic figures, sending the Secretary of the Union of
Proletariat Writers to Yalta in the midst of a cold rainstorm and stripping him
of his clothing: he is doomed to catch a cold. Another of the Master’s enemies Korovjev, is beheaded when he is hit
by a tram.
The master suddenly finds that the restraints of his strait-jacket are
loosened, the door his cubicle is open and so, too, is the door of the “clinic.”
He is taken to what appears will be a performance of his play.
But
at a prelude to the play has been added, with Woland and his friends creating a
show of wizardry in which Margaret models Western clothing that miraculously
falls from the ceiling the awaiting crowd below, who delight in the sudden
shower of new dresses, shirts, blouses, coats and other garments, which they
greedily sweep up. But when they attempt to leave the theater, many of the
theater-goers suddenly discover themselves naked, and are forced to hurry into
the street to find taxis that can hide them from further public exposure.
In the last scenes we see the Master
lying upon his “clinic” bed, his eyes being closed, and a shroud being laid
over his head. In short, neither the great artist no the hackneyed creators are
saved. In a society controlled by such evil, all creative acts end in
destruction.
Although this work has little of the
majestic sweep of the original, determined to focus, instead on a more naturalistic
satiric aspect of Bulgakov’s work, Petrović’s film functions as a frightful
statement of what happens when the truth no longer can be spoken. This film was
the Yugoslav entry for the Best Foreign Language Film of the 45th
Academy Awards, but was not selected as a nominee.
Los Angeles,
October 1, 2012
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