Otar Iosseliani-Brigands, chapitre VII (1996)

This crazy, satirical epic humorously portrays several eras in European history. Though the costumes and regimes change, the film suggests, the human motives of lust and greed remain the same. Jumping back and forth in time, the film condemns its characters to an eternity of irony. In one section, a medieval king named Vano, who has a penchant for exotic torture techniques, executes his wife for being unfaithful. Seamlessly the film flashes forward to the early 1930s, with another Vano, played by the same actor, portraying a low-down thief who suddenly seizes power. Intercut with all of this is the story of a contemporary Vano, a hapless drunk who wanders across the underworlds of Europe. This extraordinary film expresses rage against the dark side of human nature that keeps despots in power, despite the upheavals of history, but it does so with a delightfully comic edge. Facets




"A must-see!" - CHICAGO READER ** GRAND JURY PRIZE, VENICE FILM FESTIVAL ** "Four stars!" - CHICAGO TRIBUNE - The NEW YORK TIMES called it "wise, sad, chilling and funny" and the CHICAGO READER said BRIGANDS, CHAPTER VII is "a witty, despairing art movie." Vano, the main character, is the king of a country so beautiful and so rich that all the neighboring countries are jealous. But he is soon beset by treachery, and even his wife deceives him. Jumping through time, director Otar Iosseliani also situates Vano in the heyday of Communism, and in today’s Paris, where wealthy arms dealers live it up with beautiful women. (amazon.com - Product Description)




King Vano rides bravely off into battle, but only after ensuring his passionate Queen is safely locked in her chastity belt. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0115755/ Plot Outline)




This picture interlinks three stories on three different time levels. It starts in the present; today's Georgia is shaken by riots. Three friends are muddling through. Soon we concentrate on one of them. He plays a leading role every time. First as a medieval prince, than as a local officer of the Communist NKWD under Stalin. Those three levels are constantly referred to; they add to each other in a flow. Iosseliani has the same cast acting on all those levels. Every new entrance of the same actors in each episode underlines the continuity of occurrences in the flow of time. Despotism and terror rule at any time, injustice and bloodshed return eternally. It is for Iosseliani's craftsmanship that, along with all that bitter realization, there comes fun. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0115755/usercomments)




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. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0115755/usercomments)




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. (http://imdb.com/title/tt0115755/usercomments)