Heart of a Dog

Moscow in the twenties. Professor Preobrazhensky is a celebrated surgeon who performs rejuvenation operations on the rich, which is why he still lives in a seven room apartment in post revolutionary Moscow. He takes a dog off the street and transplants into it the pituitary and testes of a dead man, to see what will happen. The dog becomes a man. Sharikov, the result, is coarse, aggressive and quick to learn; he soon finds a job in the new regime and reaches a position from which he can denounce the professor. Vladimir Bortko directs, from Mikhail Bulgakov's Heart of a Dog, written in 1925. The story of the book is a separate matter from the story of the film. Bulgakov could not get it published in the year he wrote it; the manuscript circulated in secret and it was not printed in the Soviet Union until 1987. This television film was made a year later, under glasnost. The target of the satire is plain. Sharikov is a parody of the new man: correctly placed by class, in possession of the words, understanding nothing. What Bulgakov is really after is the idea that a revolution can redesign the human being. Yevgeny Yevstigneyev plays the professor and Vladimir Tolokonnikov plays Sharikov. Tolokonnikov was almost unknown when he took the part, and the character is still used as a byword in Russia. The image is largely pitched in a brown register; the colour was deliberately drained so it would resemble photographs of the period. Who it is for: readers of Bulgakov and anyone curious about Soviet satire. Who it is not for: the pace is slow in the television manner, the scenes are long, and most of the political references do not land without context.