The Last Station

It’€™s a long time since I’ve been to see a film. Partly this is because Kirkcaldy for some years now has no longer had a commercial cinema – the nearest one is on the outskirts of Dunfermline -€“ but also I have kind of lost interest in the medium.

However the local theatre (the Adam Smith) does put on films when it is not presenting stage productions -€“ December and January are particular deserts for this due to the annual pantomime – and I have attended there in the past.

Only about one film on their list has vaguely enthused me since I went to see Wall-E in Dunfermline – it was set in the 1930s and had David Tennant in it; I forget the title – and the one night it was on I was tired and it was raining so I gave it a miss.

However, the good lady perused the forthcoming attractions and thought The Last Station might be interesting. I was quite willing as I had read a short story a couple of years ago (sadly I can remember neither the title nor the author) which featured the peculiar circumstances of Leo Tolstoy’€™s death. We duly saw the film last night.

It tells the tale of Tolstoy’€™s last years through the viewpoint of a literary secretary, Valentin Bulgakov, played by James McAvoy, who is taken on by the head of the Tolstoyan Movement, Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti,) mainly to monitor Tolstoy‒s wife, the Countess Sonya, wonderfully played (as you would expect) by Helen Mirren.

The focus of the film is on the Countess’€™s struggle to prevent the royalties from Tolstoy‒s work being taken from the family and given to the Russian people (as Chertkov puts it) ie more or less to the Movement. As such the Countess’€™s motivation was easy to grasp, as was Chertkov’s – the classic hanger-on and leech to great celebrity. That of Tolstoy himself, though -€“ played by Christopher Plummer – was not at all well established and seemed unfathomable. The reasons for his actions remained wrapped in mystery – or in the mist that seemed to hang over Tolstoy’s estate of a morning.

Chertkov at one point stated to the Countess that —if I had a wife like you I’d blow my brains out: or go to America” (are the two equivalent?) but the relationship between Tolstoy and Sonya was still portrayed as affectionate. Certainly in the film the Countess’€™s stance was perfectly reasonable.

Bulgakov starts out as an ardent Tolstoyan, a movement whose tenets included pacifism and celibacy. We probably did not need the depiction of the relationship between Bulgakov and Masha, a schoolteacher in the Movement’s settlement at Telyatinki, hard by the Tolstoy estate – an affair whose trajectory is inevitable from our first glimpse of her – to underscore for us the shortcomings of the latter part of that philosophy.

The Movement came over as incipiently religious with Chertkov as a kind of St Paul figure in relation to Tolstoy’€™s Jesus.

A nice touch was the inclusion of real archive footage of the characters beside the end credits as they were running.

Despite any caveats above, I enjoyed it.

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