The Master and Margarita - a discussion about the movie by Michael Lockshin

And I chose it because it's a rare film that had a blockbuster budget.

But also I think it has a lot of good quality and good commentary.

on both the universal conditions and particular stuff that happens in Russia right now.

It's also a film, a recent Russian film, that was able to be released in a lot of countries around the world, including Italy, Austria, France, Germany, Sweden, Czech Republic, South Korea.

And I think it has recently been released in the United States.

And I think a lot of the stuff that comes in the film, the technical qualities, can be compared to, for example, American blockbusters.

But I think it's also...

There's a lot to discuss regarding the content of the film and how it was made.

So, yes, here's that.

Great, thank you.

So, who wants to go first?

Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, yeah, this was a very polished film.

And, um, yeah, I, I'm, I'm, I think it's probably a, a good move that none of us tried to sort of give a brief synopsis of the story.

Cause I was kind of thinking earlier, like how the hell would you do that? So kind of complicated and, and also just so up to personal interpretation, perhaps at least I couldn't really come up with a clear, like, um, you know, an unshakable interpretation of it.

So yeah, I guess just quickly, this is a story about freedom of expression amongst other things.

There was a detail that I just noticed that the second time I watched it, which I thought was really cool and funny, which is like how many times in the film people pointing up um to refer to like you know somebody and and at different points in the film they're either referring to god or to Stalin and you don't quite know you know you know from the context but otherwise you you wouldn't be clear so I thought that was quite funny um I you know this is a book that's based or somewhat based on sorry a film that's based on a book um And to be completely honest, I haven't made it all the way through the book.

I did try a couple of times.

So it's kind of annoying.

You know, last week I was kind of looking at the book on my shelf and I kind of opened it up again and I was like, there's no way I'm going to be able to read it by the time we record this episode.

So it's unfortunate.

I can't comment on that.

Not that, you know, I'm not trying to say there's a use in comparing books and films.

I think we've kind of put that one to bed in previous discussions that there's, they're just different mediums.

There's no real sense in comparing them.