Andrei Rublev

After struggling with Ivan's Childhood I was a bit wary about watching this, especially with its 3 hour runtime (watched the shorter cut, not the longer one). I also knew pretty much nothing about the film apart from it being an historical epic, nor did I know anything about Andrey Rublev himself! So at the start I was a bit confused, especially with that hot air balloon sequence which was quite odd, but also quite cool. I soon figured out that Rublev is a great artist and managed to mostly follow what was going on, although there was a lot of deep dialogue about faith and religion and art, and the nature of people and of Russia which kinda went over my head a lot, but I think I got the gist of it. It's very episodic and that left me feeling like it was a little bit disjointed at times, but not to the extent it did in Ivan's Childhood. So an hour and a half hour goes by and I'm thinking this is pretty decent but not amazing and then The Raid happens. That was pretty damn brutal and shocking and shot very well and this increased my opinion of the film. The Silent episode was also pretty good. But then we get to The Bell. I think that the 40 or so minutes of this part of the film are some of the best I've ever seen. It was just so awesome and moving. Absolute cinema! Especially when they ring the thing and the kid is in tears and Andrei Rublev is like 'there there bro, lets made sick art' and everything is good in the world. Then suddenly, after almost 3 hours of black and white medieval life and suffering, it switches to vibrant colour for 10 minutes to let us admire Andrei Rublev's actual art and reflect on what we've just seen. That switch to colour made me gasp out loud, it was quite something. And then horses. There was some horse stuff in Ivan's Childhood as well so I'm guessing this is a Tarkovsky thing that has deep meaning or something I dunno. Anyway, the final 40-50 minutes of this film are just so fucking good that it made me appreciate the first 2 and a bit hours a lot more. It's a lot of build up to an amazing payout. I didn't really understand everything, but I really enjoyed the experience of watching it. And an end note: the kid in the bell section was the same actor as in Ivan's Childhood and he's really good. So I looked him up to see what else he was in but found out that these days he's a politician, a homophobe and a Putin ass-licker which is all very disappointing. Kinda glad I didn't find out about that until after I watched his pretty damn good roles in both these films.