La Mort d'Ivan Illitch

Alexandre Kaidanovski is the follower of well-known metaphysic soviet film director Andrey Tarkovski. He played the leading male role in Tarkovski's SOLARIS cult 70s sci fi. This is Kaidanovski's second directorial work and it is one of his best in my opinion. First of all, the short story by Leo Tolstoy "The death of Ivan Ilyich" is masterpiece of Russian literature and the director managed to express the original story very deep. The story is about a man who says that he is completely happy, and soon starts to be seriously ill. He was very narrow-minded person and never cared much about the main questions of existence such as death and its meaning, so when he looses health all those scary questions come to his mind. He speaks to the God, sees the beyond world, starts to believe in orthodoxy, but his time is over.

If you like Leo Tolstoy- please see this rare 1985 black and white stylish movie.

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