The Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film of 1994. Not too hard to see why. Russians penitent about their Communist history (the purges of the Thirties, in specific) are bound to be warmly embraced in the West. On their knees and under the lash is how Westerners like them best. But there are intrinsic merits here as well. Artistic ones as opposed to diplomatic ones. Director Nikita Mikhalkov, with his traceable connections to Eisenstein (caricaturistic characterization) and Dovzhenko (the "symbolic" fireball that floats across the screen in literal illustration of the title), is not without a measure of movie sense, notwithstanding the all-over wet blanket of anemic color. The jacking-up of the protagonist to heroic stature is economically and emphatically done: the sight of him (portrayed by Mikhalkov himself) on horseback did not really require the assistance of the overamplified music. And the villainy of his nemesis from the KGB is firmly nailed down in the image of him seated at the piano wearing an insectile gas mask and pounding out an ever more demonic can-can. This sort of heavy-handed shorthand is quite at odds, however, with the "Chekhovian" ambience which some observers have noted, and which the movie bullyingly prods them to note by way of an explicit reference to The Cherry Orchard. It's true that the scope of the piece is a single day — an extremely elastic and capacious day — in the company of a group of people at a country house. But the similarities stop there. Or at any rate rapidly start to dwindle there. The accumulating irony ("Cherish your Mother Russia!") is heavy; the dark foreshadowing is heavy; the clear labelling of characters is heavy. (And sure, the actor-director's real-life and on-screen daughter, Nadia, is cute, and his dimply dreamy on-screen wife hardly less so, but all this thickly laid-on cuteness gets heavy, too.) And heaviness is an automatic disqualifier. Oleg Menchikov, Ingeborga Dapkounaite. (1994) — Duncan Shepherd
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