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It was a month after Phoebe was born that we dared go out for the night (leaving her with a baby sitter obvs) and even then that was just because we’d been invited to Buckingham Palace for dinner. But you’re much more casual with baby number two and tonight we left our kids with their Nana to go to the premiere of “The Death of Stalin”. I had had about three hours sleep after getting in late after the podcast and Catie was similarly knackered (for some reason - I mean I don’t know why, it’s nearly a fortnight since the birth, she can’t keep harking back to that as an issue), but this was as much about proving that we could still have a night out in town even though we live in the middle of nowhere and that having two kids wasn’t going to stop as partying, as anything else.
They mainly can’t stop us partying because we never started partying, but that’s not the point.
We missed the red carpet bit of the event because we were too late for the train we needed and I then thought we couldn’t make it in time (I was wrong, I think - it was in a different place to the cinema, but we should have gone there first), but I mainly just wanted to see the film anyway. I wondered how they would make the crimes of Stalin and his cohorts funny and the answer is that the comedy largely came elsewhere… or through the darkness that comes from torture, rape and murder. But it’s the juxtaposition of the pompous and silly and scared men in charge jockeying for position against the seriousness of the crimes that were being committed in their names. It was mainly horrifying for me, but beautifully put together and brilliantly written and performed, successfully telling a very complex story in under two hours.
Critics have been calling it the funniest film of the year/decade/whatever time span, but I am not sure it’s the comedy that makes it remarkable. The reviewer doing the Q and A at the end summed up the snobbishness of critics when he made a comment about it being the funniest film he’d seen for (insert span of time) but then felt the need to qualify this by pointing out how deep and clever it was. As if those things were mutually exclusive. Like getting laughs some how devalues everything. Like comedy can’t be serious. But there we go. It’s a perennial problem. It’s why comedy films rarely win Oscars and it’s why people get upset when comedians make jokes around a serious subject.
So well done to Armando and the team for pulling this off. Because this film is about murder, rape, death, betrayal and human monsters and yet you’re still pulled along by the farce. But not so much that you aren’t shocked by the brutality and disrespect for human life. But they haven’t really had to add much farce to it. The terror of the Terror is that behind it all were these bumbling, scheming, vain, clueless, serial killing men.
I knew a bit about the early part of Stalin’s career, but didn’t study beyond 1945 and so knew very little about all of this, but Beria, who this film centres around (along with Khrushchev) is a chilling individual who shows what can happen if you let a psychopath into a position of unassailable (until the end) power. Accidentally (according to Armando) this does seem to be rather pertinent to the way politics is going now. No doubt in 30 years time, if there is a world and films are still being made in it, someone will be able to tell the true story of Trump with equal comedic panache. Why the Hell anyone would want to put a paranoid psychopath in charge of the world, I don’t know. Colleagues might not be treated quite as viciously these days when they outlive their usefulness… at least for now… but the odds are still stacked against you. And you’re gambling for the prize of power contaminated by paranoia and fear. Look at Donald Trump.
He’s got away with everything so far, so maybe he will try to get away with murder (assuming he hasn’t already).
Anyway it was good to get out and to see a good film and to have to scoot across to let the Fairbrass brothers from Right Said Fred get to their seats. If you can wangle that when you go to see it, it does make things even better. I wonder why they were invited. I will ask Armando next week when he’s on my podcast.
