As with so many of my picks, this relatively recent Russian film made to the top of many lists of most remarkable works and it’s even considered to be science-fiction. I did note that whenever it’s mentioned critics always took care to state that it’s an incredibly dense and almost incomprehensible film that runs to more than three hours long. Even my cinephile friend said that he loved the cinematography but had a hard time finishing it. Considering the kind of films that he liked, this is a seriously intimidating statement.

In the event, we had to spread out the viewing across three nights and even so it was quite a chore. I understood so little of it that it’s hard to think of what I can write about the plot. We gather that this isn’t set on our world and takes place some time in the future as some of the characters reminisce fondly of Earth. This world has a vaguely medieval technology base and life there is difficult and miserable. The film follows one character, Don Rumata, around. He has an impressive looking set of armor and a sword and is apparently feared and respected by the locals. It’s hard to make out what he is doing as he visits members of the community except that he is searching for someone named Budakh. We also learn that there are at least two groups of soldiers oppressing the locals, though once again I couldn’t tell what they are after and who they work for. The soldiers greatly outnumber Don Rumata and occasionally make threatening moves towards him but he never acts as if he feels threatened.

Reading through the plot synopsis on Wikipedia afterwards I realized how much I missed, so much in fact that either I must have watched a version with a very poor translation or some people are reading a lot from very little. The difficulty of understanding what’s going on is greatly compounded by how everyone doesn’t behave or have emotional reactions in the way that you’d expect. The most common emotional affect in this film is probably insouciance even while the most horrible things are going on. Soldiers can be dragging corpses through the streets and passers-by will continue on without a care, occasionally throwing in a stinging or mocking remark. At one point Don Rumata’s home is invaded by soldiers but instead of responding promptly to the emergency, he takes his time to get up and even jokes around trying to find a dry pair of pants to put on first. When even the characters don’t seem to much care about what’s going on, it’s hard to get the audience to care either.

That said, there’s little doubt that Hard to Be a God is a beautifully shot film. The black and white photography causes the rich visual details to pop out. I was astonished by how well done the sets and costumes are, considering that this must surely be a project that has little chance of earning much money. At the same time, it seems that director Aleksei German has chosen to put all that craft in service of creating a world that is as ugly as possible. There is mud everywhere and on everyone. Worse, there are bodily fluids of all kinds and the characters here have a disgusting tendency to lick everything and smear all kinds of things on their faces and their bodies. One of Don Rumata’s trademark attacks is apparently plunging his fingers into the nostrils of opponents and pretty much tearing the nose off. While all this is going on, there will often be a character eating something in the background even if that only means grabbing something to chew a mouthful off and then throwing it away.

Even though I don’t understand what’s going on in this film, I get that there are deeper things going on beneath the surface. Throughout the film, Don Rumata keeps asking his interlocutors what he would do if he were God. The general theme is that while it seems easy for God to solve all of the world’s problems, any action that God could conceivably take comes with negative repercussions and eventually the same problem would recur. This portrait of a world weary deity combined with a dystopian setting that feels like a once flourishing civilization that has regressed to near barbarity reminds me Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series. It may be that this film can be just as rewarding as the famously difficult science-fiction epic especially if you’re familiar with the source material it’s based on.

Without that enlightenment however, I find this to be so incomprehensible and so weird that I can’t really recommend it to anyone. Even those who are interested in its excellent cinematography will be put off by its extreme running length. This film plainly isn’t shit but I don’t know who it could reach with its abstruseness.