Andrei Rublev is a pussy

Now that you know that, you can go back to sleep in the cinema where the movie is playing. Tristan and I are asleep. I’m writing this on my phone asleep, even though you are not supposed to use your phone at Cinemateque (it’s distracting for others and can lead to brawls), but how am I to know – after all, I’m asleep.

I’ve slept through a lot of this three and a half hour movie. Tristan has to, but his excuse is that he took some hay fever medication beforehand, but I know the real reason, he thinks Andrei is a pussy. I wake up during a raid and see a panicky horse attempt to descend a flight of stairs covered in blood. The horse slips and falls off the stairs lands on its back and I shudder! I can’t believe I just saw a horse do that and think maybe that’s why it was banned in Russia for five years and then I go back to sleep. I wake up and the raid is still going. The Asian enemy (Tatars) are pouring boiling oil into the mouth of a decent fella.

Rublev is not shit, but it’s overrated to the max, a masterpiece of tedium and as beautifully sterile as you can expect from someone who gets eye-popping visuals and a laborious mise en scene without any real emotional pay-off.

Gawd could Andrei be more of a sad sack loser? The second I saw him, I thought cool, we’re in for some art-is-taking-it-to-the-Church punk rock because the actor playing him smouldered a little bit like our man Viggo. Wrong. As this boat of a film demonstrates, Andrei has not much backbone. He’s a passive putz pussified to the hilt, brooding about the miseries of life in the medieval mud-splattered suburbs. Fugg do I tire of films that Bible-spank that churchy heaviosity. For Andrei's sake, I'd much prefer it if this was movie was set in 1995, the year Pavement released Wowee Zowee.

Dude you make a three and a half-hour movie about a guy who weeps when a hot witch throws her naked body at him and you got problems. Roger Corman should have remade this as drive-in smut just to make Tarkovsky’s piles twitch.

I would not watch this again if you tied me up and threw a naked witch on me! My favourite scene is the one where the horse itches its back in slow motion (pictured).

If you see this movie on DVD at a prospective lover’s house run like that shithouse is going up in flames!