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25 out of 27 people found the following comment useful :-
Underrated Masterpiece, 22 February 2001
10/10
Author: Irakli28 from Tbilisi, Georgia

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

For Georgian Cinema, every film of T.Abuladze was a landmark. Each project was at least the most typical if not the best film of its time. Visually they all are made in different style and form defined by (or sometimes defining) the trends in the contemporary Georgian cinema. (spoilers ahead !).

The major achievement of Tengiz Abuladze himself is a trilogy The Plead, Tree of Wishes and Repentance. These films got a wide critical acclaim and Repentance even became the major hit in USSR. Many Soviet and Post-Soviet Critics and viewers consider it to be the best Soviet film of 80-ies. The phrases and notions from this film became proverbs and are quoted everywhere, general concepts "Repentance" and "the Way to the Temple" where over-abused by soviet media for over a decade. But... some foreign critics were much less agitated by the film. Leonard Maltin even found it boring (while in USSR the film was often criticized for being too entertaining !!!). On the contrary film by Nikita Mikhalkhov on a similar subject - "Burnt by the Sun" was very well received in the west, while in former USSR it was simply excoriated by critics as a shallow Hollywood-oriented Soap and a definite cash-in on the glory of Repentance. Some foreign critics and viewers didn't understand anything about the Repentance (which is full of symbols and allusions, some of them are uniquely Georgian.) apart from the Stalin criticism. Here are some facts about the film that foreigners mostly do not know.

1. The story- is a real one - Beria (the darkest evil character of Stalin epoque crushed a well-known painter after he attempted to protect the Metechi Temple (a trade mark of Tbilisi-capital of Georgia), that Beria planned to destroy to build some monument. As always everyone who opposed Beria were arrested and mostly executed. But the Temple- symbol of spirituality, human values, heart of a nation survived.

2. Due to this the prologue and epilogue of the film are very important - (by the way there are 2 time periods in the film- the Past - Stalin Time, totalitarian regime, the Present - Brejnev Period, so called Zastoi (standstill, stagnation period) - time of conformism when everything became seemingly all right)- so the prologue and epilogue is the picture of the soviet Zastoi of 70-ies- everything seems to be all right and a child of family destroyed by totalitarian regime makes cakes with beautiful but fake temples on them, eventually the cake is eaten be a dirty little bearded man admiring the totalitarian past and speaking about Varlam Aravidze (read Stalin, Beria and all other monsters from the Past) with admiration, and the cake-maker (the victim of Varlam) says nothing and just imagines what could she do to remind people of truth. But this is just her imagination, people are conformists they need no truth and only old vagabond woman searches for the Way to the Tample.

3. The Axis of the film is Aravidze family (Aravidze in Georgian means Nobody's Son): we see 3 generations- Varlam - (the totalitarian past), his son Abel and His Wife- (the "innocent" conformist Present,) and Tornike- the Grandson (the future that finally must take the responsibility for the crimes of past)

4. But this " taking the responsibility for the crimes of past" is a controversial issue that's why everything happens only in the imagination of the cake-maker- becouse the degree and a form of repentance, and the repentance itself is a very complex and painful matter; and yes, the Skeleton in the Closet affects and punishes not Varlam who commits the crime but Abel who tries to hush it up and Tornike who is among few really "innocent" characters of the film. Digging out the corpse of Varlam (the Past) - is this a solution? The authors leave the question to the viewers.

5. Some scenes need explanation:

The funeral may look grotesque, but in fact its pretty realistic and is more a humoristic critique of Georgian obsession with ceremonies Georgian Cemeteries are really the monuments of human vanity - huge, with excessive use of marble, granites and other materials. Putting cage on the grave of Varlam is symbolic, but in general the episode depicts how unholy the sacred places have become in Soviet Union (Georgia), the episode with church shows the same - the church is transformed into Power Station. Episode in the greenhouse is a Naked Gun-like literal depiction of the expression "Under the Cap"(to have someone under control). During his "Inauguration Speech" Varlam makes a statement that became quintessential when depicting Stalin regime. He cites Confucius " It's hard to catch cat in the dark room, especially if it is not there" and paraphrases it "We Will Catch the Cat in the Dark Room, Even if It's not There". For those who have little idea of Stalinism the accusation for "making a tunnel from Bombay to London " may sound forced but in fact its very realistic and sounds rather tame next to some other accusations based on which millions of people were killed. Episode with Goddess of Justice has dual symbolism: First, the goddess has become a lady of dubious reputation playing piano with a stalinistic prosecutor, second, the actress making cameo appearance here appeared in the first part of the trilogy as well (the Plea) there she was a symbol of beauty and purity.

6. The cast is "all star" (of Georgian cinema of course). Many viewers even didn't noticed that father and son- Varlam and Abel are acted by the same actor !!! The old lady at the end of the film looking for a temple, is last screen appearance of Veriko Anjaparidze, perhaps the greatest Georgian actress. By the way her character is obvious "older" Pupala from the "Tree of Wishes", there this character was acted by S. Chiaureli -daughter of Veriko.

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15 out of 20 people found the following comment useful :-
Dated maybe but still masterpiece maybe, 23 May 2004
10/10
Author: Jerzy Matysiakiewicz (jorg@skim.ws) from Zabrze, Polska

For the first time I've seen this movie in 1988 under, rotting and toothless, but still red regime in little movie in Bytom, Poland. Without subtitles but only with man reading the dialogs from the book. Atmosphere was tensed and with the taste of conspiracy. This time Pokajanije was for me thrilling experience with breathtaking performance of Macharadze and Ninidze. Once again I watched it in TV few years later and I've found a little dated and emasculated in uncovering communist's crimes. But still it was great cinematic, beautifully filmed experience. Now, I've ordered DVD in dvdplanet (it's still unavailable in Poland) and I'm really curious for my nowadays impression.

25 dec 2004

Today I've watched the movie once again after the reading of Montefiore's book "Stalin - the court of the Red Tsar. In this book I've found the story of Kawtaradze family. Sergo Kawtaradze, old revolutionist and comrade of Stalin during the great purge, in 1936 was arrested with his wife Sofia. Both were cruelly tortured in Lubianka. Daughter Maya, 11 years old, wrote many letters to Stalin, begging for the parents' life. After 3 years of imprisonment Kawtaradzes were freed but still in danger of arresting again. Few weeks later suddenly at 6 AM Stalin & Beria came to Kawtaradzes. Stalin kindly spoke with daughter Maya. In her memories she wrote that he was charming and kind. He also sang a song with "pleasant tenor". They also ate dinner (Stalin ordered it in the best georgian restaurant in Moscow, Aragwi. I'm sure that episode in the movie when Warlam and Doxopulo visits Sandro's home is loosely based on this event

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16 out of 22 people found the following comment useful :-
A very good film, 9 April 2001
10/10
Author: (bbcd64@hotmail.com) from Paris, France

This is a very good film. It works on several levels. I don't know whether this was intended by it's authors or no, but the general outline of the film has obvious Alice in the Wonderland (or Through the Looking-Glass) allusion. The confectioner woman imagines (or dreams about) a story of revenge and justice (a real cruel fairy tale adventure full of evil and good characters, colorful and strange images) and as in `Alice' right when the story gets kind of `out of control' (grandson kills himself with grandfathers riffle, son digs out the corpse of his father.) we get back to the cosy room of confectioner, from where our adventures to the past and future have begun.

It was really interesting to see the story of Totalitarian regime through this `fairy tale' angle. They make a lot of films that are meant to be much more historically precise than `Repentance', but most of them are flat and look more like TV dramatizations of some definite actual events than the works of art. And `Repentance' is an art-film in a very good sense of this word.

The closing sequence of Old Woman walking up the street (looking for the Temple - justice, freedom, happiness?) accompanied by heavenly classic music is one of the most beautiful film episodes I've ever seen.

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10 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :-
An astonishing portrait of a totalitarian monster, 2 November 2006
10/10
Author: gray4 from Somerset, England

This wonderful Georgian film emerged from the last years of the Soviet regime, but seems to have disappeared without trace. The final film of a trilogy by the veteran film-maker Tengiz Abuladze, it portrays a composite monster, Varlam (Hitler moustache, Mussolini shirt & braces, Stalin boots, Beria pince-nez) and his equally grotesque son Abel, both played by the same actor.

The film has a surrealist, dreamlike quality about it, framed by initial and final scenes in a cake-shop and with police almost comic in medieval armour. The main actions which initiate the plot are surrealist with the repeated exhumation of Varlam's corpse. The two monstrous central characters are no more than mayors of a small Georgian town - but there is nothing comic about their actions and the reign of terror they bring to the community. The elements of tyranny are revealed economically, with hints of atrocities and disappearances but only one brief torture scene. The overall message is that of personal responsibility. The tyrannical regime is not an anonymous bureaucracy but the deliberate creation of evil men. And the final repentance is a horrific recognition of those responsibilities. An unmissable film, beautifully made and superbly acted - if you can find it.

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11 out of 14 people found the following comment useful :-
Repentance, 7 September 2004
10/10
Author: Ivane from tbilisi

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

The action takes place in the USSR province of Georgia, today. Varlam Aravidze's funeral has been a very solemn ceremony. And yet, the very next day, his body is dug up and dumped into his son Avel's garden. Buried once again, the body is once again unearthed, as if this man's corpse was destined not to rest in peace.

The culprit is soon found. Ketevan Barateli is dragged to court where a long flash-back shows us the persecutions her family had to endure under the dictator. He persecuted her father, her mother, who have since both disappeared and then Ketevan herself, with a cruelty sadistic and pervert.

The trial brings to light the truth about a man who was but the mayor of a small town but whose personality and behaviour bring to mind both Mussolini and Hitler, as well as Stalin and Beria.

Varlams Grandson commits suicide when he discovers the truth about his grandfather and denial of everything by his father.

And still the dictator's corpse cannot rest in peace...

Varlam & Avel Aravidze is played by Avtandil Makharadze. Brilliant performance - one of the best dictator faces ever done.

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9 out of 13 people found the following comment useful :-
Cinema at its best, 9 April 1999
10/10
Author: grendel-28 from Mad City, WI

A very philosophical movie with easily traceable references to Stalin and Beria but still a general study in tyranny and victimization, beautifully filmed and masterly acted.

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7 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :-
A beautifully realized, fascinating vision of humanity., 22 April 2003
8/10
Author: stedrazed from United States

My only complaint about Tengiz Abuladze's REPENTANCE (English title) is that I am uncertain what was real and what was fantasy. However, since this was undoubtedly his intention, I cannot properly call it a complaint. Outside of David Lynch films, I have never seen more perfectly executed dream imagery than that of REPENTANCE; the beauty of these sequences is accentuated by the surreal atmosphere of the various dreamers' waking lives. The cast is uniformly excellent, the premise unique, and much of the dialogue resonates with beauty, despair and universal truth, often mingled with humor. No character is utterly devoid of sympathy, nor is any character entirely sympathetic. All is ambiguous, just as it is in our own so-called "reality".

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6 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :-
Less known,yet brilliant, 20 February 2005
10/10
Author: Vlad Rotariu (vlady_r2002@yahoo.com) from Sibiu, Romania

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

Repentance is yet another pleasant surprise among the large number of great European films. Like in Greek tragedy destiny haunts and twists the lives of the characters with endless and unseen power.The only one who defied destiny with a demonic hubris during his entire lifetime was the tyrannical patriarch Aravidze,but even he is weak in the face of death.That is,only after he dies and his body is constantly spirited away from his grave by an unseen hand(a brilliant parallel to Lenin,king Arthur-who actually never dies,only sleeps awaiting the moment when he is reclaimed and re-called by the living,Garcia Marquez's symbol of the eternal tyrant,another patriarch,who lives over two hundred years or again the Greek tragedy,where the gods were pleased and the ritual fulfilled,only if the dead were buried with all the honors. Aravidze,a Georgian like Stalin,though only the mayor of a town,is a ruthless social climber(the way totalitarianism attracts social climbers like the flames attract moths),who gradually becomes an absolute master of the town's inhabitants.Besides Stalin,the character bears a striking physical resemblance to Hitler and his rise reminds much of Hitler's:he exhaled strong personal magnetism,enchanted with powerful(even if somewhat Machiavellian)speeches,and,the more he became cruel,the more a certain petty-bourgeois crust worshiped him. Other similarities include Beria,not only being also a Georgian but also the actor depicting Aravidze looking just like him and a black shirt in Mussolini style.Strange and fascinating combination between four of the 20-th century's most influential dictators. In an age resembling both fictional 1984 and real historical periods,Aravidze surrounds himself with all the status symbols of power like a nouveau rich or a mafia boss:cruel henchmen,tasteless amounts of wealth and luxury,a mechanism of self-marketing including the cult of personality and hysterical public feasts. But the ultimate victims of this dictator,among many nameless and countless innocents,will be his own family,which not long after his death will be extinguished,ironically the only innocent member of this flawed clan,his grandson paying for his ancestor's faults by shooting himself in an unexpected act of conscience during a party including lots of champagne and music by Boney M as an highly artistic and grotesque contrast of lavish,explosive gaiety versus his haunted&troubled mind(similarly to this,present generations were intoxicated with the feeling of guilt for communism,fascism or the holocaust,only for being the descendants of the guilty ones). The excessive use of marble does not suggest as much luxury,it rather creates a cold,unfamiliar mood similar to the futuristic,minimalistic settings in Russell's The Devils:a mechanized,haunting universe where humanity is doomed. The journey in the underworld reaches the same artistic level like Dante's inferno,Dali's paintings or T.S.Eliot's poetry.The ending if brilliant-the slow,long shot of the road reminds of the closing scene from Visconti's Gattopardo;like the old desolate streets and decaying baroque buildings of Palermo,this road is a reminder of universal frailty,often useless search for justice and repentance and the inevitability and strange fascination of death.

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2 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :-
everything you see in this movie makes you think...., 17 January 2008
Author: sanni-seven from Georgia

*** This comment may contain spoilers ***

For me, that's what a true movie should do: make you think, discuss what you saw with others and, as importantly, with yourself... So many incredible scenes... So many questions, for which you should find an answer suitable for yourself... Many things seem ingénues and at the same time a little absurd: the medieval guard in the middle of the 20th century, the Barateli court scene, the deadman being dug from his grave... makharadze plays in a way that makes you sit open-mouthed... the scene of killing the sun is a masterpiece, as well as the scene of Abel on a confession... simply brilliant...

The character of Varlam Aravidze is also an incredible creation of both Makharadze and Abuladze: can you imagine Beria, Stalin and Hitler fused in one person? well, you get this person here, and the horror is that this person looks just like you and me, not a monster everyone sees drawn in their fantasies...

Quotes, dialogues and phrases take special place in this film... By listening to how Varlam talks, how he addresses people, you get a template of how a person can become a tyrant, dictator... "We will catch the black cat in a dark room, even if this cat is not in the room"

and, of course the question of the century: "is it worth to kill millions to save hundreds of millions?" publicly everyone will say "no, it's not"... but in reality...

I'll finish with one of the main things said in the movie, one of the reasons this film is a masterpiece: "will this road lead me to the temple?"...."why do i need a road that does not lead to the temple?" these are the questions of the 20th century as well... you decide what a "temple" is and whether or not we are on the proper road...

this film truly deserves all the praise it got from the world community...

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Film as witness, 4 September 2009
10/10
Author: matthewscott8 from United Kingdom

The movie starts with a newspaper obituary recording the death of Varlam Aravidze, the mayor of a town in Georgia. We're then shown what has happened in the town in the past when Varlam was mayor. He's nominally a communist type, however it's made pretty clear that his stripes, and the stripes of all Stalinists, are feudal. This is shown, for example, by having the police of the town dressed as mediaeval knights. It's an idea explored in Iosseliani's Brigands too, that Russian rulers have been a succession of crazed autocratic knaves.

At one point in the film Varlam plaintively quotes from Shakespeare's sonnet 66:

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As, to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplaced, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgraced, And strength by limping sway disabled, And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly doctor-like controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tired with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

Which is a harangue against everything he stands for. He's a man who has knowingly chosen to do wrong, a comedian who has turned his fiefdom into a comedy of terror. At one point he arranges for his son to jump out of a second story window to shock his captive audience, but in fact the boy is caught below. He surrounds himself with illiterate sycophants whom he brings into and out of favour arbitrarily, arranges for people to be arrested and benevolently releases them when complaints are made. In the end however he's merely a snake playing with its live food before devouring.

Varlam arranges for people to be exiled, presumably to Siberia although we're not told. One day a shipment of logs arrives on the outskirts of town. They have been logged by the kidnapped men of the town. Each survivor has carved their name into the end of the timber. Women from the town trudge around the muddy lumberyard looking for their husbands' names, looking for proof of life for men denied the right of correspondence. This is the most powerful scene in my opinion.

There are also a number of dream scenes and very surreal scenes that are very appealing in their artistry, which I leave the reader to discover for themselves.

Varlam is, as has been pointed out, a concoction of dictators (superficially containing elements of Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin), but may well, in more concrete terms be based on a real life figure, Georgian-born Lavrentiy Beria, a man more unpleasant than the imaginations of most can conjure up. He was Stalin's chief murderer, a sexual sadist who performed unimaginable feats of depravity, he also briefly participated in the running of Russia as part of a "troika" after Stalin's death. The film does not dwell on the huge depths of his depravities, as the acts he performed are unspeakable and unfilmable. The film is a quiet but firm indictment however of Stalinist politics, of the manipulation and double-think and an ode to Georgian culture.

The purpose of the film is to not let Beria, or more generally the authoritarians of the time, rest in peace; to act as testament to the cruel depravities of the Stalinist era.

In my opinion it's absolutely unmissable.

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