Agony: The Life and Death of Rasputin

Russia, 1916. The war is going badly, men are dying at the front, and inside the palace a Siberian peasant has the ear of the throne. Rasputin has won the empress's trust: he interferes in ministerial appointments, offers advice on the army, and drinks himself insensible at night. The nobles around the court have come to see him as the end of the regime and decide to kill him. The poison does not work, the bullets are not enough; the man will not die. Elem Klimov directs, with Aleksey Petrenko as Rasputin and Anatoliy Romashin as the tsar. Two hours and twenty-two minutes. Klimov cuts real archive footage in among the staged scenes. The film sat on the shelf in the Soviet Union for years and only reached cinemas there in the mid-eighties.