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Rating: I love Fëdor Michajlovic Dostoevsky with sincere love, with a love that has nothing platonic about it, a carnal love. It must have been difficult to sustain his gaze - one iris almost black and the other swallowed by an avid pupil. I would have lowered my gaze, the sight is everything. The world resides there, in the sight, and it's no coincidence that Fëdor Michajlovic Dostoevsky was endowed with such a fierce pupil. The world under the desires of his pupil, the world deformed under the spectrum of this pupil, first explained through the scientificity of socialism, then ordered by God. Well, God is Dostoevsky ("The Idiot") because in Dostoevsky resides the total perception of man or what is often believed to be so, of what he is and what he appears to be, of his good and his evil. He encountered Siberia - after meeting death and resurrection on the scaffold - and it is there, among the snows, that he met man, the wretched, the sub-proletarian without a proletariat, and he fell hopelessly in love with man because in man he met himself, he met God.
And here is everything. There's the life of Fëdor Michajlovic Dostoevsky - modified and animated to move away from a simple documentary - that meets the characters of his novels, there he understands, there he challenges them before his words and actions... there are his novels and his thoughts, lucid, lively as only those of a reactionary with the temperament of a revolutionary can be.
Dostoevsky hounded by his creditors is forced to write the last pages that separate him from the conclusion of "The Gambler" with the help of the stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina - who soon will become his wife and played by Carolina Crescentini -, but an avid reader of his, Gusiev, an exile from a small secret association that aimed to kill the imperial family - a revolutionary who found God following the footsteps left by Dostoevsky’s words -, sends for him... because killing is the simplest thing, because he loves Alexandra - also a student and revolutionary - who will soon kill the Grand Duke.
The narrative of the film and the system of characters reflect the events narrated in "The Devils". Gusiev is the poor Ivan Pavlovich Shatov, a former serf, who becomes the unwitting engine and victim of the devils. And the film, exactly like the book, takes up the main key, the theorem that the reactionary Dostoevsky was so eager to prove: children are always the result of the fathers' guilt (Rehberg and Barres had already taught this).
And so Alexandra will not change, she will always want to kill the Grand Duke inspired by the words of the young Dostoevsky who still believed in the scientificity of socialism. The story begins with the words of the young writer and is accomplished in the events and in the guilt of the old writer and in this, it is worthy of its inspirer.
One day, for seven euros and a missed lunch, with my ass on a bench, among useless students, I met God. I met myself. "There is still some reason for hatred that I miss. I'm sure it exists" read the initial dedication. It was "Mea Culpa" by Céline, the most beautiful man who ever walked on this scum of a planet.
The world around me collapsed. We killed God in the name of a development that does not exist and will never exist, in the name of the pain/pleasure of feeling free, of a freedom from frivolous, stupid morality. I did not believe in God, I do not believe in God, I believe in myself, I believe in God. God resides in every man, in his imperfections, in his evils, in the feeble possibility that this man might manage to love and understand another being. This is what Dostoevsky speaks of: of love... of God, of me. Of you, of us. Of man. Let's not waste time on revolutions... let's love each other.
Giuliano Montaldo - The Demons of St. Petersburg (2007)
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