Saturday | March 23, 2002 7:00 pm

Taurus
(Telets)

Screening on Film

Directed by Alexander Sokurov.
With Leonid Mozgovoi, Maria Kuznetsova.
Russia, 2001, 35mm, color, 90 min.
Russian with English subtitles.

A strangely tender account of the final days of Lenin in 1923, Taurus is the second work in Sokurov’s tetralogy of portraits of “men of power in the twentieth century.” Chekhovian in tone and setting, the film takes place in a country mansion whose inhabitants bemoan their expropriated belongings and imminent demise. The film (the first Sokurov shot himself) is tinged with a blue-green pall that hovers like a twilight of loss and regret: the power of the “comrade leader’s” personality cult has dissipated, and all that is left in its wake is a quiet unease and gathering obscurity.