To any Westerner who doubts that things are changing in the Soviet Union, Tengiz Abuladze's Repentance will come as a shock. The 2 1/2-hour film, which was first released in Moscow a year ago and opened in the U.S. last week, is a powerful denunciation of the Stalinist-style police state and all its horrors: personality-cult paranoia, official corruption, institutionalized mendacity, arbitrary arrests and executions, dehumanizing labor camps. That Abuladze was ever allowed to make this film is remarkable. That it has been shown to millions of ordinary Soviet citizens, many of whom greeted it with standing ovations, is astounding. And that the Soviets chose to distribute the work abroad is a shrewd advertisement for that heady mixture of public relations and public confession that Mikhail Gorbachev has popularized under the banner of glasnost.
The film, which Director Abuladze calls a "tragic phantasmagoria," uses allegory, fantasy and surrealism to evoke the terror of a totalitarian system. His central character is Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a provincial town. Varlam combines Stalin's close-cropped haircut, Hitler's mustache and Mussolini's black shirt to embody the image of a universal tyrant. Although the setting and time are undefined -- secret police appear alternately as medieval knights or spear-wielding Roman centurions -- there is no doubt that the real subject is Stalinism.
The action begins with Varlam's funeral, which is soon followed by the appearance of his corpse in the family garden. He is reinterred, but reappears several times before the authorities capture the offending grave robber, a woman whose parents had been arrested and killed by Varlam, and take her to trial. Her testimony, studded with flashbacks and Fellini-like dream sequences, tells the story of Varlam's brutal reign. There are false denunciations, mass arrests and mad ravings by the tyrant, who utters such Newspeak absurdities as "Four out of every three persons is an enemy of the people."
One particularly striking scene depicts the woman's childhood memory of roaming through a lumberyard with her mother in hopes of finding her father's name carved on one of the logs sent there from a labor camp; their search is in vain, but another woman does spot her husband's initials and caresses them tenderly. Another memorable sequence shows the defendant's artist father, dressed only in a white loincloth, hanging by his wrists like the crucified Christ. It is one of several explicit religious images that portray the struggle of good against evil in a way that unfailingly identifies the latter with officialdom and the former with its victims. Lest the viewer miss this point, Varlam appears as the devil in one scene.