Taylor Hackford's Cold War fable, made well outside the spirit of detente, tells of a star Soviet ballet dancer and celebrated defector who has the bad luck to be aboard a Japan-bound jetliner that crash-lands behind the Iron Curtain and the good luck to be put in the care of a black American tap dancer who has defected in the other direction and has had time to regret it. So often we have heard about, so seldom actually been shown, the specter of the Siberian mines dangled in front of repressed Soviet artists. But here we have it (and a lot more): back, in other words, to basics. In the resultant stampede of stereotypes, the slightly droopy, melting-point face of Mikhail Baryshnikov speaks better for Russian soul than does the already half-melted one of Gregory Hines for Negro soul. But Hines does better on what was presumed to be that special Russian province: gloom. Then again, Baryshnikov, in the dance numbers that are elbowed and shouldered into the action as insistently and improbably as in any old Gene Kelly musical, leaps across barriers and makes deeper inroads into tap territory than Hines is ever allowed to attempt into ballet. Both of them are in a sense outdone, however, by Jerzy Skolimowski, a serious enough director in his own right who doesn't seem to mind how low he stoops in another man's movie, as a KGB watchdog with chiselled slits in place of eyes (widened, momentarily, to reveal actual eyeballs on his titillated enunciation of "nigger") and a lip that does much more than curl: it slithers, it writhes. With Helen Mirren and Isabella Rossellini. (1985) — Duncan Shepherd
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