Aleksandr Sukorov

Molokh (Moloch) / Alesandr Sokurov (1999). The banality of evil. Easy to say, not so easy to show or understand. There is always a problem with movies about Hitler. The actor playing the Nazi Führer can never reach the person inside the world’s worst mass murderer. There are those who reason that it shouldn’t happen at all, shouldn’t even be tried, because “understanding” Hitler, in some way, means excusing him, normalizing him. But I don’t think that is a worry. Not even the our best actors (Alec Guiness, Bruno Ganz, e.g.) can achieve more than a perfect impression of an unhinged mind at the moment of his downfall. Sokurov solves this problem by abandoning history, even reality, to show mass murderers acting like silly humans. The action of the film mostly takes place during a single day. We first see Eva Braun bored and restless in a castle built on the top of a mountain. Ghostly clouds float below her. Then, Hitler arrives with Martin Bormann and Josef and Magda Goebbels. They party. They listen to music. Dance. Take an excursion on the mountain side. They laugh manically, forcing themselves to have Fun! Hitler delivers meal time talks in which he dispenses nutritional advice (eat more nettles), comments on other countries (Poles have droopy mustaches because of their Mongol ancestry), and exalt the virtues of the Aryan male (“Comprehension is strictly a masculine faculty. The more stupid a woman is, the more expressive she is. It’s not by chance that the wives of great men were all idiots. Mozart’s wife, for example, a stupid cow”).They hardly seem to realize that a war is on. Eva comments that she doesn’t even know who is fighting whom. When Hitler asks a visitor, “Do you know how many battalions I command?” “No.” “Many!” he says triumphantly. They watch a newsreel about the tank corps but all Hitler can do is criticize the camera work and despair over the future of the art of film. Eva’s is the main point of view. She is the only person who can kid Hitler or talk straight to him. Almost at the end, after Adi (as she calls him) has thrown a rant in their bathroom dressed in undershirt, briefs, and black socks, she kicks him in the butt. This sets off an almost embarrassing lovers’ fight, you know, where they start to chase each other, push and punch, yell insults, and then hit the sack for sex. We see some of the most monstrous people who ever lived behaving like the most shallow couples you ever knew. And it is deeply disturbing.