Coming from engravings

“I will always root for those who fight for justice and for honesty. But at the same time, I realize that this battle can never be won. But we cannot give in, otherwise evil and stupidity will strangle us.”

Milos Forman

Foreman is true to himself. His new film plunges me into a state of deep shock. After leaving the cinema, it takes time for the body to begin to feel itself in space again, and for the consciousness to at least partially return to reality. Forman's works cannot be looked at with half an eye, one cannot think about them with half an eye. The scale of the director’s personality is such that the images he creates completely capture the mind and heart.

Everyone noticed that “Ghosts of Goya” is not a film about the artist or about the corresponding period of Spanish history. Actually, the same as “Amadeus” - the film is far from biographical. Forman is not one of the artists who illustrates the facts of the past. All that remains is to understand why, then, this film was made, in which the acts of the Holy Inquisition and the story of a desecrated innocent soul almost overshadow the main character?

Milos Forman is 75 years old. He had not filmed anything for a long time and suddenly... returned to the topic of the Spanish Inquisition, which had occupied him since his years at the Prague film school. Interest in events of such a distant past turned out to be surprisingly persistent. It was as if Forman had been nurturing this film all his life, waiting for his first youthful emotions to become harmonious and his thoughts to become sober. Now, half a century later, the film “Ghosts of Goya” sounds like a summing up, like a farewell film.

Some critics note with bewilderment and dissatisfaction that Goya’s biography is greatly distorted, that his numerous children, wife and mistress are absent from the script, and instead we are presented with some kind of hermit who very reluctantly participates in the events taking place around him. Indeed, the actual details are not that important. Goya is the image of an artist who contemplates and analyzes, observes and records. In general, Forman made a film about himself, about how he understands his role in society - the role of an artist, for whom nothing is more important than maintaining fidelity to the truth in his work.

The film begins and ends with Goya’s drawings, but all the other frames are as if the same drawings come to life and are connected into a single narrative. The images created by Forman and Goya merge, their worldview intersects, historical parallels suggest themselves. The footage dedicated to the Inquisition evokes in the Russian viewer an already genetic horror of their native Lubyanka. And the director himself admits: “In Spain during the time of Goya, I was looking for an echo of my life under the Nazis and communists...”

The picture begins with a very eloquent dispute about the works of Francisco Goya, which unfolded in the council of the Inquisition:

// “These drawings can confuse minds,” says the head of the council.

“They portray the world as it is,” objects the film’s protagonist, brother Lorenzo.

- Your world?! This may be your world, Brother Lorenzo!

- There is only one world. He is not yours and not mine.//

This dialogue is something like a brief introduction by the director. We all live in the same world, gentlemen, and if you don’t like those sides of it that I show, this does not mean that they do not exist... Yes, Foreman, even in his old age, remains an incorrigible nonconformist, categorically convinced of the uniqueness of life and artistic truth. But who needs this truth? And what exactly does it consist of?

Iness, the daughter of a wealthy Spanish merchant, is arrested by the Inquisition on absurd charges. Trying to save the girl, Goya takes on the role of mediator in negotiations between her father and the inquisitor Brother Lorenzo. The artist's efforts do not produce any results. Moreover, after Goya’s intervention, brother Lorenzo goes to visit Iness himself and, taking advantage of the girl’s helplessness, seduces her.

Fifteen years later, the French occupiers who came to Madrid released all prisoners from Spanish prisons. The once beautiful Iness, changed beyond recognition, regains her freedom. Now she is obsessed with only one thought - to find her daughter, born in prison from her brother Lorenzo. And again Goya tries to help the unfortunate woman. Again he comes to Lorenzo for help, now invested with new, secular power. And again, this intercession brings only misfortune. Lorenzo, afraid that his shameful monastic past will become public, hides Iness in an insane asylum and begins the hunt for his own daughter, wanting to get rid of her.

Goya no longer enters into the struggle with circumstances. At the end of the film, he dissolves into the crowd raging in the squares and actively experiencing all the city events. From a participant in life, he becomes its observer. Without parting with a pencil and notepad, he non-stop makes sketches from life. The chronicler’s position seems to him the only honest one, and he angrily accuses Lorenzo of conformism, having so dashingly deserted the camp of conservative clerics to the “progressive” French.

Critics almost unanimously dubbed Lorenzo a villain and a conformist. In general, this is how the network is. His heavy glance from under his brows makes you shiver. The evil he has created calls for vengeance. Truly, Foreman succeeds in nothing as brilliantly as the images of negative heroes. Probably precisely because they are not as trivially negative as they seem.

An ardent hunter of heretics, a fighter for the purity of faith, hiding violent passions under the mask of sanctimonious piety, this obscurantist monk one day flees from Spain and fifteen years later appears before us as a respectable family man, an inspired preacher of the ideas of the French Revolution. It seems that he will preach any ideology with equal fervor, just to get more comfortable in life. However, the plot takes an unexpected development. At the beginning of the film, brother Lorenzo, unable to withstand torture on a makeshift rack in Iness’s house, signs a mocking document, a confession that he is the illegitimate son of a chimpanzee and an orangutan. Thus, the poor girl’s father is trying to prove that testimony obtained under torture cannot be considered true. At the end of the film, Lorenzo again faces a choice. Having fallen into the hands of the Inquisition and appearing before a church court, he gets a chance to save his life by publicly repenting of betrayal and violation of monastic vows. But this time no amount of torture will force repentance out of Lorenzo. It’s one thing to sign an absurd confession that you are a monkey, thereby sullying the already dubious honor of a monastic cassock; it’s quite another thing to testify against the truth, imputing to yourself as a sin what you consider the main revelation of your life. The truth discovered by Lorenzo says: freedom and life begin where the iron hand of the zealots of piety does not extend. And he does not for a minute repent of the fact that he once fled from his fellow believers. The “conformist” and “villain” dies a martyr for freedom.

“Ghosts of Goya” is a film about the confrontation between the human personality and the totalitarian system, about how good and evil, strength and helplessness, cowardice and resilience are intertwined in the world. And it’s also about how unsteady and unstable the world is, in which a cozy living room can at any moment turn into a place of torture, liberators into occupiers, prisoners into punishers, scoundrels into heroes, and vice versa. This is a film about how two indestructible forces live within a person, which cannot be defeated either by suffering or death. These forces are love and the thirst for freedom.

At the end of the film, the insane Iness walks behind the cart on which the corpse of the executed Lorenzo is being transported, tenderly holding his hand. With her other hand she holds the foundling baby close to her. Following this group, the artist steps hesitantly. What remains for him? The only true path in this world is the path of the dead and madmen who firmly believe in their own rightness.