I Demoni Di San Pietroburgo

Giuliano Montaldo

Italy

Synopsis

The writer Fyodor Dostoevsky must find a young woman and convince her to call off an assassination attempt in 1860s St. Petersburg.

REVIEW

Even if the title doesn't immediately cast your thoughts in the direction of Dostoyevsky's "The Possessed" (variously translated also as The Devils or The Demons), and even if your knowledge of pre-revolutionary Russian history isn't so detailed as to include particular criminal cases where revolutionaries turned on each other, this film may well enthrall you. It is beautiful, the acting is very good, and the screenplay carries us through intricacies of passion, politics, madness (or not), domesticity, addiction, loss, trickery, and memory, so that in the end we may return to the title as an enigma: Who or what are the demons in this story?

On one hand, they may simply be all the characters who are guilty in one way or another of treachery-from the protagonist Dostoyevsky's greedy publisher to his unforgiving creditors, from the police to the revolutionaries, from the aristocratic ladies to the madman. But the nuanced story offers further possibilities. What about memory? What about how a person may be "possessed" by memory strumming through her life at the slightest provocation? What about the "demons" of time passing, so that one generation's experience somehow can't speak to a new generation? Or could these demons be the demons of violence that never seem to desert human endeavors born from terror?

"The Demons of St. Petersburg" is a treat not only for the mind but also for the eyes. A rapturous visual paean to Russia's most "European" city, the cinematography gives us St. Petersburg itself as a main character in a drama of disconnect between the passionate political awakenings of young urban intellectuals and the "people" they-and Turgenev-idealize. Dostoyevsky, the character, doesn't buy into this hagiography (nor did the novelist himself), however, having discovered during a decade passed in a Siberian gulag that these "people" are as petty, jealous, greedy, frightened, and even at times thankful, as any urban dwellers. He finds no source for the revolution in "the Russian people" and adopts an anti-violent creed whose rare followers among the young generation put themselves at grave risk.

Part murder mystery, part love story, part historical novel, "The Demons of Saint Petersburg" beckons with the allure of a burnished leather book. Open and enter the past; open and ponder the present.

-Beverly Allen