Friday, December 16, 2022
Citizen X
- Commentary: I am thrilled that I happened to be reminded of this movie and found it available at a very cheap price. I initially saw this movie when my mother was alive and we were companions. At that time, my mother had a full-tilt subscription to a cable outlet and received, among many, many stations, HBO. I'm sure that my mother also saw this movie. I don't remember her reaction to it because my involvement in it was so intense. My guess is that, being the kind of movie it is, involving the vagaries of working in a hamstrung bureaucracy, which is what the movie is really about, she probably didn't pay much attention. I was riveted by this movie and never forgot it. Doubtless, I probably also watched it more than once through my mother's subscription, which may account for my vivid memories of particular scenes. At any rate, it's been years since I've seen it, so I'm looking forward, with anticipatory pleasure, to it becoming a part of my collection, soon.
Update 12/31/22: After having just finished watching this movie the first time since I added it to my collection, well, it's weird, because it's very easy to spend most of this movie bristling with indignation, frustration and depressing disgust at the situations portrayed in this film in which we humans find ourselves simply by virtue of being human. And, yet, at the end, in the last minutes of the movie, and the last day of the legal detention of Andrei Chikatilo, he is broken by a psychiatrist who uses an innovative and very personal technique for eliciting a full confession of his crimes ... and is, by the way, executed. Somehow, the resolution of this nasty, brutal case, despite the many failures that almost allowed Chikatilo to go free, again, gave me hope for humanity. Not that I believe execution is a good idea. I feel the opposite. Not that I can excuse the beaurocratic nonsense that allowed this man to offend against his fellow humans for so long. But, there is something heartening in the fact that a few people stayed with the task, with true hearts, until it was correctly concluded. A lot of the time it is frustrating as hell to be human, but, sometimes, a few humans get it right and renew the faith in humanity that the rest of us desperately want reason to have. That is the crux of this lightly fictionalized version of this true story.
Actor Role Actor Role Actor Role Actor Role Stephen Rea Lt (later Cnl) Viktor Burakov Donald Sutherland Cnl (later Gnrl) Mikhail Fetisov Jeffrey DeMunn Andrei Chikatilo Max von Sydow Dr. Alexandr Bukhanovsky Joss Ackland Bondarchuk John Wood Gorbunov Ion Caramitru Tatevsky Imelda Staunton Ms. Burakova
Here's a link to the Wikipedia write-up of the film.
Release Date: 1995
Directed by Chris Gerolmo.
Labels: detective1, docu-drama, donald-sutherland, imelda-staunton, TV3
