Une exécution ordinaire (2010)
Directed by Marc Dugain

Film Review

The acclaimed French novelist Marc Dugain makes an impressive directing debut with this darkly compelling adaptation of a short story (I Am Only Stalin) taken from his 2007 anthology Une exécution ordinaire, a book which explores Russia's susceptibility to totalitarian rule from the 1950s to the present day.  Rather than attempt a broad historical fresco, Dugain concentrates his narrative on a small human drama that revolves around the relationship between Stalin and a young urologist he pressgangs into becoming his personal physician.  In doing so, the writer-director not only conveys something of the Stalinist era as experienced by most ordinary people living in Russia at the time, he also makes a decent stab at unpicking the psychology of Stalin, one of the most infamous tyrants in history, and about whom surprisingly little is known.

Right from the very outset, Dugain was keen that André Dussollier should play Stalin, even though the physical resemblance between the two men is minimal, to say the least.  Dussollier saw the role as a challenge and even though he initially had reservations about taking the part he inhabits it with surprising ease; thanks to a superb make-up job (which took three hours to apply each day) his appearance is totally transformed into an astonishing similarity of Stalin in his later years.  Dugain's other inspired decision was to keep the dialogue in French to avoid the distancing effect caused by dubbing and/or an inadequate translation.  As a result, Dugain manages to craft a daringly intimate portrait of Stalin that takes us as close to the real man as is perhaps possible for a work of fiction, and the effect is as chilling as it is instructive.

Dugain makes no attempt to humanise Stalin - to do so would be futile and fly in the face of documented historical fact.  Stalin, the self-proclaimed Great Architect of Communism, was a manipulative and sadistic monster, and Dugain's film does nothing to dispel this illusion.  Stalin's dark nature is revealed to us through his relationship with Anna, the young doctor he continually taunts as she treats him for his worsening ailments.  As we watch the film, we expect that, eventually, Stalin will relent and develop warmer feelings for his attentive physician, but this never happens.  If anything, the dictator becomes increasingly cruel towards Anna, threatening not only her life but also the lives of her husband and parents.  With a staggering insensitivity, he reads to Anna an account of her husband's arrest and torture, and you feel he is almost goading her into taking action against him, an impulse that she doggedly resists through fear of what may result. Whilst we cannot sympathise with him, Stalin emerges as a tragically pitiful figure, a solitary old man robbed of the ability to engage with others and therefore condemned to be in private what he is in public, a soulless dictator without an ounce of humanity.

Yves Angelo's sombre cinematography, with its limited palette of autumnal browns and yellows, not only evokes this era of Soviet history perfectly, it also brings an unbearable Kafkaesque sense of confinement, and the sweet stench of decay, redolent of a poorly ventilated mortuary, lingers in almost every scene.  We are plunged into a world that is stale and oppressive, drained of warmth and human feeling, where everyone informs on everyone else and no one can ever feel safe.  The heroine is forced to separate from her husband, knowing that she is his only reason for living, through fear that Stalin will have him arrested.  The fear of being denounced makes her easy prey for her colleagues, who extort indecent favours from her.   Stalin does not appear on screen until thirty minutes into the film, but his presence is felt right from the off, an all-encompassing force of evil emanating from the nucleus of the Soviet machine, like the tendrils of some vile life-sapping plant.

Dugain's mise-en-scène and screenplay are, admittedly, more theatrical than filmic but this hardly matters, given the quality of the performances from the fine cast at his disposal.  In addition to the impressive turns from the leads André Dussollier and Marina Hands, there are strong contributions from the supporting cast: Edouard Baer, Denis Podalydès, Tom Novembre and Grégory Gadebois.   Podalydès provides the one and only instance of light relief, as a fussy concierge akin to the comedy porter in Shakespeare's Macbeth, whilst Baer takes us by surprise with an uncharacteristically subdued performance of touching sobriety and finesse.

In 2002 André Dussollier won a César for his performance in La Chambre des officiers (2001), another adaptation of a Marc Dugain novel (directed by François Dupeyron).  This pales into insignificance when compared with his portrayal of Stalin in Une exécution ordinaire, possibly his finest performance to date.  Dussollier's Stalin is no caricature but an authentic and subtle interpretation of a hard-to-pin-down historical figure, which is perfectly complemented by Marina Hands' conflicted portrayal of the woman who is both his victim and his healer. Through Anna's protracted torment Dugain gives us a glimpse of the misery endured by those living under Stalin's rule, the millions whom the dictator cynically regards as a mere statistic.  The archive images that we see at the end of the film, where Stalin is seen lying in state, fanatically mourned by ordinary Russian people as if he were a much-loved near-relation, provide a perverse contradiction of how history remembers the tyrannical leader and assert the paradox that was Soviet Russia - a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, as Churchill once put it.  Marc Dugain's film may not resolve this intractable riddle but it brings us a little closer to understanding just who Josesph Stalin was, the man behind the icon.

Film Synopsis

In the autumn of 1952, a young woman doctor is working at a hospital in the suburbs of Moscow.  She is desperate to become pregnant by her husband, a disillusioned physicist whose only reason for living is the love he has for his wife.  The doctor is distressed when she receives a summons to attend to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, who is close to death.   Despite his infirmity, the ruthless dictator has lost none of his guile or perverse cruelty, as the young doctor discovers when she unwittingly becomes both his confidant and his victim...