“The Master and Margarita” in the cinema – the devil saves us?

This is a single great revenge fantasy in which Mikhail Bulgakow wrote from 1928 until his death in 1940. Six versions were created, all were rejected by censorship as not printable. Where is the Teufeliade here? In the novel itself or in dealing with the author?

But everything is much stranger: Bulgakow absolutely wanted Stalin read “master and Margarita”. Should he recognize himself in Woland, the saving devil that comes to Moscow to count with all the enemies of the “master”? Hard to say. The fact is that Stalin ensured that Bulgakow was not murdered (like so many other Soviet artists at the end of the 1930s) or disappeared into a gulag. He is also not allowed to leave the Soviet Union and in the end everything he writes is prohibited (except for the play “The days of the turbines” that Stalin personally likes).

The dictator gives Bulgakow a permanent position on the theater and a phone – and even calls it. The gentleman about life and death can be on the phone at any time – who shouldn’t go crazy? The life of the author Mikhail Bulgakow seems a single bad dream, as the encounter with a theater director he described in a letter shows in 1934: »I read. The theater director, who is also a director, listens to, expresses total and apparently sincere enthusiasm, wants to perform, promise money and says he will come back in 40 minutes to eat with me. After 40 minutes he comes back, eats dinner, says no word about the piece, then disappears as if the ground had swallowed it and has disappeared since then. “

“The Master and Margarita” is made of such surreal encounters. Art hits power, and as is well known, this is managed at all times by their adepts, the farmsters of power. All of these are Bulgakov’s bitter enemies, even when his name is mentioned, they warn of the dangers of bourgeois decadence. Bulgakow lets them appear: Leopold Awerbach, for example, literary critic and head of the Rapp literary association (he was also shot in 1937) – at Bulgakow it is called Berlioz and is beheaded by a tram, as Woland predicted.

One suspects: history is spread here, in a way that does not prematurely buried. For my generation in the GDR, “Master and Margarita” was a kind of literary Bible in the face of the plate of socialist realism. And for the director of this Russian-Croatian co-production Michael Lockshin, the story apparently also has something pressing, at least his film adaptation of “Master and Margarita” is anything but historicizing.

Certainly this is also due to Lockshin’s biography. In 1981 he was born in the United States, in 1986 his parents emigrated to Gorbachev’s Soviet Union. In Moscow he went to school, studied psychology, then moved to London and started making films. At first it was advertising films, in 2020 he gave his feature film debut with “Silver Skates”, which became a sensation in Cannes.

Since he is half -Russian, half American, he was now able to realize the major project “The Master and Margarita” in Russia – some absolutely promote them that absolutely wanted to prevent others. The film, which came to the cinema after a long tug of war at the beginning of last year (without any advertising), immediately found six million viewers.

Apparently this Kafkaeske has history about writers in the mental institution, burned -down noble apartments of state loyal propagandists, tortured exclamation such as “This country is full of superstition!” There is also a utopia here, it summarizes in the sentence: “Do not burn manuscripts.” And that is actually a single Klagelaut.

The question is a very current one that this film is heading for: “Do you already know how everything will end?”

But the direction resists the temptation to turn a chamber game to turn a tortured author with a dreamy opposite world. No, he relies on effective pictures, this is science fiction, but in the sense of Bulgakov. Sometimes it seems an overly opulent indulgence in pictures. This shares this film adaptation with an earlier eight-hour TV series for the Russian television of Vladimir Bortko (which is available as an original version as a DVD). In 1988 Bortko had already filmed Bulgakov’s “dog heart”.

Lockshin can also score here with his actors: August Diehl is Woland, an impenetrable Mephisto who knows about the absence of Faust (a positive hero), a dark counter -power that should only be entrusted if you have completed life. A fury of annihilation – and yet in “Master and Margarita” something like the last hope. A truly black dialectic when Mr. August Diehl acts great here.

We see the Danish actor Claes Bang as the powerless power that comes from Jesus Christ, surprised Pontius Pilate. That is the parallel story in “Master and Margarita”, which deals with the trial of Jesus as an alleged elevator against the Roman occupying powers. In the middle of all this mosaic -like symbolism, the constant change of time levels and the degrees of reality to keep the perspective here does not seem for granted – but Lockshin succeeds in making an audience film here at the same time and Bulgakov’s parabola on power and art to raise on a very philosophical level.

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Jewgeni Zyganov as a master and Julia Snigir as Margarita are driven who are looking for a stop in the middle of a baseless states, but are not found anywhere. In some times, the horizon remains darkly darkened-we can also see that here, in the middle of the elaborate-computer-animated scenery (camera: Maxim Schukow), in which Moscow seems to merge with the old Rome. Everything remains shadowed in a bad way.

The question is a very current one to which this film is heading for: “Do you already know how everything will end?” And I think of this almost apocalyptically threatening words of the great Mosfilm productions of the past of directors such as Andrei Tarkowski, Elem Klimow, Alexander Mitta or Nikita Michalkow-as well as the long series of important Russian authors who are unusual for us this country and its people, to be his political leadership.

But art can still overcome enemy images, to build bridges of understanding. Michael Lockshin’s clever as well as visual film adaptation of “Master and Margarita” is now part of it.

“The Master and Margarita”, Russia 2024. With: August Diehl, Julia Snigir, Jewgeni Zyganov, Claes Bang. 157 min.