Before I went to see this film, I thought it would be a very interesting film, and I would enjoy it a lot. This is because it was a film on the last days of Lenin, and that I liked Russia a lot. Lenin was such a important person in the modern history, therefore I expected that the film would be very exciting and had a lot of twists, such as political plots or assassination conspiracies. In addition, Russia had a lot of beautiful landscape, and I thought the film would be shot in a lot of nice scenery. However, I was wrong.
The film was mainly shot inside a very old house. The house was very colourless, even the curtains, beds, cupboards had very plain colours. Therefore, the film looked very dull. 80% of the film was shot inside the house, and there was not much going on. His wife would read him stories, feed him, and sometimes the doctors came to see Lenin.
It depicted Lenin to be a demented old man, who could not walk without assistance. He could not even think clearly. The only thing that he could think clearly was that, he wanted to die. To hear this from such an important person was quite shocking. He had so much power in his hands, though his best days were gone, I still could not imagine that he wanted to die. I do not know whether this part is history or fiction, as I am not very good in history.
The worst thing in the film was that, the actors had no emotion. All of them did not smile, laugh, cry. They had no facial expressions at all throughout the whole film. I think that facial expression is the key to convey messages and emotion to the audience. However, in this film, as there were no facial expressions, I could not clearly understand what the characters were feeling. As a direct effect, I could not relate to this film, and therefore I found this film to be boring.
Another bad aspect is that, the pace of the film was extremely slow. Why did the director had to show Lenin sitting on a chair doing nothing for three minutes? Or why filming them siting in a car for a long time without conversation? To sum up, I found this film to be very disappointing, and not what I expected.
