Andres Salama
One of Director Otar Iosseliani's stronger films. The movie takes place during several periods of time in his native country of Georgia: in the Middle Ages, in the early 1900s, during the Stalinist period (the bulk of the movie) and in the chaos of the early 1990s. The same actors often play different characters at the different periods of time (for example, the guy playing the medieval king also plays a Stalinist henchman and a contemporary smuggler). The movie works through vignettes full of deadpan humor, and a common thread of all the stories seems to be the absurdity of life, the arrogance of power and man's inhumanity to man. Iosseliani even plays a couple of roles here, as a Stalinist torturer, and as a present day bumbling projectionist, in one of the film's most elaborate gags. Overall, a great movie, with Iosseliani's caustic humor telling us, as the old Latin proverb said, that homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man.
Cristi_Ciopron
What are the features of Iosseliani's cinema?It is so savory,so fresh,so intelligent,so original,ironic,unconventional, inspiring.The Carnivalesque and conventional barbarity of the medieval scenes is strongly contrasted with the cold cruelty of those settled during the Communist epoch.Brigands, Chapitre VII (1996)'s theme is a historical one:the Communism 's atrocities are keenly investigated.The conception is a phenomenological one:it shows the facts in themselves.The content's treatment is calligraphic,and of a wonderful transparency.Each frame is minutely composed,and almost any scene has a joke or a gag.There is no lumber.Despite its relatively big length,the show excels in in concision and its narration is lapidary,succinct,elliptical.Otar Iosseliani's gusto,and the make-up's economy,are delightful;he uses a refined photography and chromatic.In a playful and funny note,that only serves his fundamental sobriety and propriety,Otar Iosseliani is caustic,sarcastic, incisive,clever.The scent of the torture tools;a schoolboy's denunciations include his father and his teacher.The jail,then the lock-up,the dead's stretcher, the death's corridors,swallow step by step everybody.The terrorist system devours itself,but its reserves ,its resources are huge.An executioner drinks water from his palm's dipper sullied with his victim 's blood.The segments about the Communist world are rending,in their concision.The stretchers are covered by shrouds.The executioner's son is invited to watch his father's trade,from behind a screen;when the boy goes out in the street,he describes enraptured to his mother the methods he saw.His father is a tall man,with long,expressive,nimble hands.The unbelievable violence of the Communism ,the absurd of a civil war nowadays,are graphically presented.There is an in-exhausted artistic plenitude in this movie that expounds the Communism's wickedness,corruption, dishonesty,ill nature;unlike other anti-Communist shows,this one does not scoff at the collectivism's folly and very low human level.It grasps its devilish,cruel,measureless wrong-doing.This stripping of the accessory,this appeal to the comic's categories strengthen the impression of meaningful realism.Caustic and sardonic realism:of the historical content,of the themes,of the facts;the freshness of the approach,the striking gist of the story.The tact excludes all exaggeration.Iosseliani has much to say,and Brigands, Chapitre VII (1996) is never an empty,formal exercise.
igor_fedchenia
I am giving Brigands the highest mark. However, I believe it is virtually impossible to appreciate the movie without sufficient knowledge of Soviet history and perhaps some involvement into Perestroika and post Perestroika cultural context.The film is an antithesis to very famous movie by Tengiz Abuladze (also a Georgian as Iosseliani) Monanieba (Confession). The later was one of the first attempts to rethink and reevaluate the past involvements of all layers of society in Stalin terror. It was of special significance that a Georgian has made such a film because Stalin even until now possesses a status of icon in his home country. Confession took a stance that all that had happened was a great tragedy and everybody was guilty to have let it happened.Brigands, on the other hand, portraits the Stalin terror as something very mundane and boring, pushing a viewer to only one logical conclusion that it was unavoidable having in mind that authorities in all times had been no more than ordinary brigands, gangsters and robbers. Iosseliani uses the same cast to play historically parallel roles from medieval Georgia to the very recent events of collapse or the Soviet Union. The same actors and repeating at least in spirit parallel events create some static recognizable core in seemingly distant and different stories.The film appeals to various known historical facts such as personal Stalin involvement in criminal acts of bank robberies before Bolsheviks had noticed him.It is a masterpiece in both cinematographic and philosophic way.
