Aug 25, 2024
AUGUST DIEHL as Woland in The Master and Margarita (2024) | dir. Michael Lockshin
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AUGUST DIEHL as Woland in The Master and Margarita (2024) | dir. Michael Lockshin
Michael Lockshin - The Master and Margarita (2024)
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA (2024): I don't feel any more qualified to analyze Mikhail Bulgakov's monumental Soviet novel than I do Goethe's FAUST (of which it is to some extent a satirical inversion), but this impressive new Russian feature adaptation, directed by Michael Lockshin and co-written by Lockshin and Roman Kantor, makes the rather bold decision to restructure the story rather than simply dramatizing it (as did Vladimir Bortko's more literal 10-part Russian TV version from 2005). Much has been pared down, sometimes severely, including a lot of the novel-within-a-novel about Pontius Pilate (Claes Bang). Lockshin and Kantor opt instead to focus more tightly on the title characters: the Master (Yevgeny Tsyganov), a writer whose work has abruptly fallen out of political favor, eventually landing him in an asylum, and his fiercely loyal mistress Margarita (Yuliya Snigir, dizzingly attractive), who will literally go to the Devil to save him.
It took me a while to warm to this approach, since "burned-out middle-aged male author pulls improbably beautiful younger woman based entirely on his unappreciated literary genius" is one of my least-favorite tropes; it is certainly an element of the novel (leavened a bit by the awareness that Margarita was based on Bulgakov's wife, Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova, who not only preserved his jumbled manuscripts for the novel, but also later edited them into a final version and arranged for it to finally be published more than 25 years after his death), but there's also a lot more besides that in the book than this film includes. Fortunately, Lockshin and Kantor are not so foolish as to deprive the audience for too long of the sinister delights of Professor Woland (August Diehl) and his diabolical retinue, and their rather belated arrival offers welcome reassurance that the filmmakers have not completely lost their heads like the unfortunate Berlioz (Yevgeny Knyazev).
What the restructuring most achieves is establishing a more palpable sense of peril for the main characters (underlined by Anna Drubich's strong score), something that the novel carefully veils. Tonally, Lockshin's take on Woland's midnight ball and the fate of the two lovers invites comparison with PAN'S LABYRINTH, and the ending, although not really that different from the book, feels darker. It's not quite as dazzling as it wants to be, some special effects are still subpar (although much better than the Bortko version), and it's never as funny or approachable as the the novel, but it's satisfying overall. One minor distracting point: While some characters' dialogue is in languages other than Russian (Woland speaks German, and what's left of the Pilate storyline is in Latin and Aramaic), it's always overdubbed in Russian, so in those scenes, you hear the same dialogue in two languages from two speakers at once; subtitles would be preferrable. CONTAINS LESBIANS? No. VERDICT: A worthwhile and generally compelling cover version, although probably not the best introduction to the story if you've not read the book.
The Master and Margarita (2023)
Director: Michael Lockshin
Writing credits: Mikhail Bulgakov, Roman Kantor, Michael Lockshin
Cinematography: Maxim Zhukov
2h 37m
Michael Lockshin on Russian backlash to 'The Master and Margarita' | AP ...
My thoughts are in many ways similar to those of Mikhail Lokshin. As I sat in the audience I was surprised at how accurately the movie describes the present time. The movie "The Master and Margarita" really could not have been made in the present time, it is a breath from the past. A past where Russian movies were released on Western streaming services, where foreign actors and musicians came to Russia and did great things together with Russian creative people. I hope that in the near future the horrible, unnecessary war will end and the power in my beloved country will change