"The Master and Margarita" in cinemas | Will the devil save us?

This is a single, grand revenge fantasy that Mikhail Bulgakov wrote from 1928 until his death in 1940. Six versions were created, all of which were rejected by the censors as unprintable. Where is the devilry here? In the novel itself or in the author's treatment?

But it's all even stranger: Bulgakov absolutely wanted Stalin to read "The Master and Margarita." Could he have recognized himself in Woland, the savior of the devil who comes to Moscow to settle accounts with all of the "Master's" enemies? It's hard to say. The fact is that Stalin ensured that Bulgakov wasn't murdered (like so many other Soviet artists in the late 1930s) or disappeared into a Gulag. He wasn't allowed to leave the Soviet Union either, and ultimately, everything he wrote was banned (except for the play "The Days of the Turbins," which Stalin personally liked).

The dictator gets Bulgakov a permanent position at the theater and a telephone—and even calls him. The master of life and death can be on the phone at any moment—who wouldn't go crazy? The life of the author Mikhail Bulgakov seems like one bad dream, as demonstrated by the encounter he described in a letter with a theater director in 1934: "I read aloud. The theater director, who is also the stage director, listens, expresses total and apparently sincere enthusiasm, wants to perform, promises money, and says he'll be back in 40 minutes to have dinner with me. After 40 minutes, he comes back, has dinner, doesn't say a word about the play, then disappears as if the earth had swallowed him up and has disappeared ever since."

"The Master and Margarita" is made of such surreal encounters. Art meets power, and this power, as we know, has always been administered by its adepts, the courtiers of power. All of these are Bulgakov's bitter enemies; at the mere mention of his name, they warn of the dangers of bourgeois decadence. Bulgakov lets them appear: Leopold Averbakh, for example, literary critic and head of the Rapp Literary Association (he too was shot in 1937) – in Bulgakov's version, he is called Berlioz and is beheaded by a tram, as Woland prophesied.

One senses that history is being unfolded here, in a way that doesn't prematurely bury it. For my generation in the GDR, "The Master and Margarita" was a kind of literary bible in the face of flat socialist realism. And for the director of this Russian-Croatian co-production, Michael Lockshin, history apparently also has a certain urgency; in any case, his film adaptation of "The Master and Margarita" is anything but historicizing.

This is certainly also due to Lockshin's biography. He was born in the USA in 1981, and his parents emigrated to Gorbachev's Soviet Union in 1986. He went to school in Moscow, studied psychology, then moved to London and began making films. Initially, he made commercials, and in 2020, he made his feature film debut with "Silver Skates," which became a sensational success at Cannes.

Being half Russian and half American, he was able to realize the major project "The Master and Margarita" in Russia – which some were determined to support, while others were determined to prevent. The film, which was released in theaters at the beginning of last year (without any advertising) after a long tug-of-war, immediately attracted six million viewers.

Apparently, this Kafkaesque story about writers in mental asylums, the burnt-down luxury apartments of pro-government propagandists, and tortured cries like "This country is full of superstition!" has once again found resonance—and, I suspect, not only in Russia. A utopia exists here, too, summed up in the sentence: "Manuscripts don't burn." And that's actually a single, plaintive cry.

The question this film is addressing is a very contemporary one: “Do you already know how it will all end?”

But the director resists the temptation to create a chamber play about a tormented author who escapes into a dreamed-up alternative world. Instead, he relies on effective imagery; this is science fiction, but entirely in Bulgakov's spirit. At times, it seems like an overly opulent reveling in images. This film adaptation shares this with an earlier, equally worthwhile eight-hour TV series for Russian television by Vladimir Bortko from 2005 (the original version is available on DVD). Bortko had already filmed Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog" in 1988.

Lockshin also scores points here with his actors: August Diehl is Woland, an impenetrable Mephistopheles, who is well aware of the absence of Faust (a positive hero), a dark counterforce one should only entrust oneself to when one has come to terms with life. A fury of destruction – and yet, in "The Master and Margarita," something like the last hope. A truly dark dialectic, whose master August Diehl acts magnificently here.

We see Danish actor Claes Bang as Pontius Pilate, surprised by the non-violent power emanating from Jesus Christ. This is the parallel plot in "The Master and Margarita," which concerns the trial of Jesus as an alleged instigator of the Roman occupation. Maintaining a sense of perspective amidst all this mosaic-like symbolism, the constant shifting of time levels and degrees of reality, seems a challenge – but Lockshin succeeds in simultaneously making a film for the general public and elevating Bulgakov's parable of power and art to a thoroughly philosophical level.

Yevgeny Tsyganov as the Master and Yulia Snigir as Margarita are driven people, searching for stability in the midst of unstable conditions, but finding it nowhere. At times, the horizon remains darkened for a seemingly indefinite period – we see this here, too, amidst the elaborately computer-animated scenery (cinematography: Maxim Zhukov), in which Moscow seems to merge with ancient Rome. Everything remains uncomfortably shadowy.

The question that this film is heading towards is a very contemporary one: "Do you already know how it will all end?" And when I hear these almost apocalyptically threatening words, I think of the great Mosfilm productions of the past by directors such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Elem Klimov, Alexander Mitta and Nikita Mikhalkov – as well as of the long line of important Russian authors who brought this country and its people closer to us, without being naive about its political leadership.

Yet art still has the power to overcome stereotypes and build bridges of understanding. Michael Lockshin's clever and visually stunning adaptation of "The Master and Margarita" is now one of them.

"The Master and Margarita," Russia 2024. Directed by Michael Lockshin, written by Michael Lockshin and Roman Kantor. Starring: August Diehl, Julia Snigir, Yevgeny Tsyganov, and Claes Bang. 157 minutes. Release: May 1.