Poor, Poor Pavel

One night a patrol bursts into the chambers of the Russian prince Pavel. The Empress Catherine, his mother, has died. The throne now passes to her son. The court had long treated Pavel as feeble minded. The new Tsar falls out with that court almost at once. He dismisses courtiers who have served for decades. He orders that peasants work no more than three days a week. He demands that state officials begin their day at five in the morning. These decrees store up anger inside the palace. Everyone with the means to do so starts building a plot against him. His own sons are part of those plots. The film sets the splendour of the court beside the whispering in its corridors. Dirty bargains are struck in gilded halls. Whether Pavel is sane is left open. Melnikov shows him as ridiculous and pitiable at the same time. Viktor Sukhorukov and Oleg Yankovskiy appear in the one hundred three minute film, a Russian production Vitaliy Melnikov finished in 2003.