A Mester és Margarita

Interestingly, the Polish TV production with an incomparably lower budget and ambitions impresses me much more strongly and fulfills the intellectual foundation of the book more, in my opinion, than this much larger and more spectacular Russian series. Maybe it's precisely because the Poles managed with a third of the runtime, so the plot was much denser than Bortko's work, which deals with the complicated Soviet past of the 1930s, and where, among other things, we can also meet Beria as the second most powerful figure of Stalin's era. This version of The Master and Margarita is simply too sprawling and sometimes meandering, in which the traditional Russian handicap is evident - the unwillingness to edit. Otherwise, Anna Kovalchuk is beautiful, and as the protagonist's fateful love, she performs excellently. On the other hand, the characters from The Devil's Suite seemed somewhat uncharismatic to me. Overall impression: 55%. (2011.06.01)