45 years of The Desert of the Tartars
On October 29, 1976, Valerio Zurlini's film "Il deserto dei tartari (The Desert of the Tartars)" was released in Italian cinemas.
The film is based on a novel by Italian writer Dino Buzzati, published in 1940. In 1989, this novel was first published in the Soviet Union under the title "Tatar Desert". The French newspaper Le Monde in 1998 included this novel in the list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century. (I will note in passing that this list includes 3 works by Russian-speaking writers: "The Gulag Archipelago" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, "The Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov, and "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov. Although, the last of the named works was written in English.)
The Russian translation of the title of the novel by the Italian writer is not entirely accurate. As, however, translations into some other languages, which mean the Tatars as a people. The true meaning of the Italian title of the novel, as well as the film, comes from the ancient Greek concept of "tartar", which is closer to the concept of "the afterlife".
Many directors thought about the adaptation of Dino Buzzati's novel, in particular, Michelangelo Antonioni. But everyone was stopped by the issue of funding. Only thanks to the initiative of Jacques Perrin, who acquired the rights to film adaptation from the writer and produced the film, the film adaptation of the novel took place.
The selection of Valerio Zurlini as director of the film was made by Jacques Perrin as a a sign of gratitude. The fact is that Perrin believed, and not unreasonably, that it was Zurlini who made him a real movie star by filming the 1960 film "La ragazza con la valigia (Girl with a Suitcase)". This film was followed by film masterpieces that brought Perrin worldwide fame, in particular, "La vérité (The Truth)" by Henri-Georges Clouzot, "Z" by Costa Gavras, "Nuovo Cinema Paradiso" by Giuseppe Tornatore and others.
Thanks to the production skills of Jacques Perrin, it was possible to collect in the film a real constellation of actors of the first magnitude: Vittorio Gassman, Giuliano Gemma, Philippe Noiret, Fernando Rey, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Max von Sydow and others.
Valerio Zurlini's film did not take part in prestigious international film festivals. Accordingly, the film had no festival success. Only the "native" Italian Film Academy awarded the picture of its three David di Donatello awards, including Best Film and Best Director (in both cases - along with the film "Un borghese piccolo piccolo (An Average Little Man)" and its director Mario Monicelli).
In cinemas in many countries, including the USA, the USSR and many others, Valerio Zurlini's film "The Desert of the Tartars" was not shown until the beginning of the 21st century. Accordingly, this film went unnoticed for film critics in many countries. All the more important is the evaluation of the film by the famous Indian film blogger Jugu Abraham, the author of the blog "Movies which make you think". In his review, Jugu Abraham noted that the fate of Valerio Zurlini's film is in many ways similar to the fate of its literary source. Just like Dino Buzzati's book, the meaning of which fully "reached" the minds of readers and literary critics only half a century after its publication, Valerio Zurlini's film received well-deserved marks from film critics and moviegoers only a few decades after its premiere.
It may be too late. Because, as one of the most authoritative Russian film critics Sergei Kudryavtsev writes in his review of the film, who gave the film 9.5 points on a 10-point scale, “for Zurlini himself, who never managed to shoot anything else, having committed suicide six years later as if at the point of the “golden section of life”, this picture became prophetic in its own way, since the heroes of “The Desert of the Tartars” live as if in anticipation of the soonest and imminent end of their earthly existence, even involuntarily wanting to bring the sorrowful outcome closer, already tired from the obsessive expectation of something unknown. "
The rating of Valerio Zurlini's film "The Desert of the Tartars" is evidenced by the following figure: 60% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this picture ratings from 8 to 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of Valerio Zurlini's film "The Desert of the Tartars" according to FilmGourmand's version was 7,921, which allowed it to take the 835th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
