"Moloch" is a Russian film about Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun, set on a cold, cloudy day in the spring of 1942, in their mountaintop residence of Berchtesgaden, in the Bavarian Alps. The film begins with Eva (superbly played by Russian actress Elena Rufanova) frolicking naked on the terrace and waving randomly to spying telescopic eyes. The morning mist envelops her Rubenesque body. She awaits her lover, her beloved "Adi". Fat, graceless, and often filmed out of focus, she's anything but sexy. But despite that strange opening scene, "Moloch" isn't a piece of Nazi nostalgia kitsch. It's a superbly directed, wonderfully acted and profoundly disturbing masterpiece from Russia's greatest living director, Aleksandr Sokourov. But unlike his earlier, insomnia-curing stylistic exercises like "Mother And Son" (1997) and "Confession" (1998), it's also totally involving and unforgettable. At one point, during a conversation between Hitler, Goebbels, Bormann and Eva, someone mentions Auschwitz. Hitler claims not to know about such a place. Or maybe he just pretends not to know? The film never resolves the mystery. Is it a bit of revisionist history, or just a gentleman refusing to discuss business at the dinner table? Ambiguous and mesmerizing, "Moloch" is an extremely cold movie. It's a portrait of evil at its most banal, human and seemingly unthreatening.
