Review of Meeting Gorbachev (2019) by Mauro_Lanari — 11 Nov 2021

(Mauro Lanari).

With a real documentary, without fictitious inserts and after abandoning the cinema of "acting", Herzog finds in Gorbachev another figure worthy of his best cinema, and explains it himself in the film: a character from Greek tragedy, aware of having stubbornly desired a dream too big and beyond the limit, a man who on his grave would like to be written a humble "We tried", both on the human and political fronts. Yet there is an abysmal difference between the various "Aguirre" or "Fitzcarraldo" and "Gorbachev": this time it is not the defeat of a delirium of omnipotence, of a utopian idealist who crashes against Nature and its indomitable laws, but of a statesman who was demonstrating how the Leninist way to a "human" communism was viable, so much so that the conservative forces dismissed him with a putsch. The "repubblichino" Ezio Mauro plays dumb denying the historical and macroeconomic evidence: the fall of the Wall in '89 was only a consequence of the multiple reforms carried out during his secretariat from 1985 to 1991. Growing up in a kolkhoz, he had learned to increase the purchasing power not by raising incomes, salaries and wages (see Landini and today's false left), but by keeping prices down and therefore the cost of living. The variables to modify the gap between rich and poor are 2, and a left that is truly such acts on the second, not on the first one.