Andrei Tarkovsky’s ‘Andrei Rublev’ Is A Classic That Is Just As Relevant Today As It Was 50 Years Ago [Re-Release Review]

Most movies don’t make the effort to challenge their viewers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Diversion and entertainment add necessary spice to our media consumption diets, and besides, diversion and entertainment can lend its own profound insight into our life and times, as well as the travails we face on this planet we call home. But movies that do challenge viewers, that make nothing easy for whoever watches them, but reward the intrepid cineastes who do, are a rare sort, worth seeking out when opportunity affords, and in their complexity enhance one’s appreciation for all other movies in history’s canon.

Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Andrei Rublev,” enjoying a fresh restoration courtesy of Janus Films, is exactly that kind of movie.

Enjoy this film with your friends who like movies but wouldn’t rush to their friendly neighborhood repertory theater to catch reissues of classic, underseen, or unseen works of the medium’s youth. Invite them, if they’re so bold, to sit through an epic semi-biopic about the title character, the great Russian painter of religious icons and frescos, told as a three-hour episodic mosaic covering the last two decades of his life, from the early 1400s to the early 1420s, as he struggles with his beliefs and against the folly of man. More likely than not they’ll decline, or possibly demur at the very suggestion, because what kind of friend attempts to inflict dry historical biographies on their friends?

“Andrei Rublev” earns its proportions and its stature as a masterpiece in Tarkovsky’s body of work (as well as a masterpiece in the overarching context of film writ large). The film is formally intimidating on paper and demands effort of its audience to remain engaged with its examination of Russia’s 15^th century, capturing the country’s evolution as a nation divided. Those divisions are characterized by grudges between members of its royalty and omnipresent awareness that on any given day if you were just an everyday sort trying to reap the land’s meager bounty and put food on the table, a flood of Tatar invaders on horseback might ride over your homestead and kill you. (The Tatars might also be in cahoots with your monarch’s younger, jealous brother.) And if armed, organized martial forces didn’t get you, the government might, assuming you have one unflattering word to say about either church or state.

Basically, Tarkovsky wants us to know that in 15^th century Russia, nothing was good, everything was bad, and for holy men desperately clinging to their system of beliefs, the period’s turbulent landscape meant they’d inevitably find themselves clutching at straws. Such is the arc of “Andrei Rublev’s” subject, who begins his journey as a true believer and ends it as a man whose faith is shaken by the horrors and atrocities he appears fated to bear witness to over the course of the film’s running time. Rape. Murder. Pillaging. Workaday inhumanity. Apathy toward one’s fellow man. Andrei (Anatoly Solonitsyn), who seeks only to follow the word of scripture and paint great works upon houses of worship, looks upon each of these barbarous acts, and each act itself is an umbrella sheltering a variety show of atrocity.

Amidst reenactments of carnage and frank recreations of Russian antiquity, there stands Andrei, caught in the painful dynamic those who call themselves spiritual end up in when the rigors of reality test the mettle of their spirituality: This is what happens when the godly confront human cruelty directly, and cannot help but wonder what, exactly, their god is doing up in Heaven while man murders man on Earth. In many ways, “Andrei Rublev” feels like a companion film to Martin Scorsese’s superb 2016 interpretation of Shusaku Endo’s “Silence.” In Andrei’s travels he sees the teachings of the church twisted or ignored, and subsequent suffering that occurs in the wake of twisted ignorance.

The effect of his observations leaves him shaken: The world as he sees it is not the world as it actually is. That lesson feels remarkably relevant to 2018, which is itself remarkable given the gap between now and “Andrei Rublev’s” 1966 release. We’re going through a collective phase of retrospection and introspection, where nations the world over are forcibly reflecting on the sins of their country and their countrymen both past and present; the society we think we’re living in isn’t, in fact, the society we actually live in. So go Andrei’s trials throughout “Andrei Rublev,” right until the film’s final sequence, where the frame bursts with the vibrant color of icons painted by his hand. Maybe Tarkovsky means for us to take succor from these images after making so great a time investment in Andrei’s story. More likely, he means them as a final parting shot, a tableau of enduring beauty to contrast with the naked ugliness we see over the course of the film’s run time. That’s in keeping with the film’s spirit: As “Andrei Rublev’s” narrative and themes pose us a challenge, so too does its climax. [A]