User reviews

The setting and directing of the movie is horrible. There is nothing russian to the atmosphere: the actors are speaking french all the way, no russian background music, no footage in Moscow, the actors were not behaving like russians. At the very least they could have shown some communist monuments or at least try to re-create the athmosphere like other movies like "The Americans" did.

I want my two hours of my life back. It's that bad.

Stalin comes to rest for three days in a castle in the middle of the forest. He is accompanied by Lidia, his long-time mistress. In the office there is a couch of the same kind as Freud's in London. Stalin proposes to Lidia to play the psychoanalysis game at night. During the day, the young artist Danilov, waiting to be received by the dictator to present him the project of a monument he has designed to his eternal glory. A troubled, dangerous and perverse relationship develops between the three. The challenge is to survive fear and betrayal.

Three years before his death, Comrade Stalin is no longer in very good health. His doctors recommend that he rest. He then moves to a rococo castle in Georgia and what does he decide to do there in order to regain his strength? Well, to play a very "entertaining" game: he will pretend to be a patient of Freud's while his mistress Lidia, a notebook in her hand, will play Sigmund! She will have to hear him reciting the dreams that haunt him (which include his mother, Lenin and his suicidal wife) and to interpret them... in the way that suits her terrifying lover. Soon, the entry into the fray of a young artist (who is not without carnal link with Lidia), will transform the perverse duo into an even more nightmarish trio. Fanny Ardant, now behind the camera for the third time, creates with great efficiency a heavy atmosphere, often nocturnal, misty, ghostly. Everything is slippery, uncertain, unpredictable, threatening... just like the Little Father of the Peoples. Depardieu powerfully composes the one who, not content with tyrannizing his people, can't help but do it with his entourage. He is well supported by Emmanuelle Seigner, whose face expresses a mixture of disillusionment, fear and cunning; to complete the picture. Pierre Hany is up to the task, making credible his character of a young artist ready to compromise himself in the official art.