The "masterpiece of soviet cinema" turned out to be artificial and absurd all through its length. Boris Pasternak's translation of Shakespeare's text not only rendered the original meaningless but flattened and simplified it to the level of "simple soviet people's" understanding. In order to reach this goal, the text was also shaped in bureaucratese. All characters speak like chartered accountants, insurance agents, lawyers, or trade union activists. You constantly feel a sort of Spanish shame for actors, like you're watching a village culture club's amateur dramatics. Oleg Dal is especially bad. Apparently, actors simply didn't understand what they should, well, act, for the text itself was bad with its unpronounceable syntax, soviet clichés, and all falsity stemming from this. For the most part, the film is a sorry spectacle, filled with illogical dashings to and fro across the screen, for these massive crowd excursions are impossible to explain neither by common sense nor by strategy and tactics of the plot itself. Horses, too. In fact, one feels sorry for the poor beasts here more than for anyone else. At first, a herd of them runs across some takyr, apparently somewhere in soviet Middle Asia (pretending to be marshes and heather), and then, immediately, they are made to climb up the White Cliffs of Dover. Inexplainable.
Review of King Lear
