Burnt By the Sun
Burnt By the Sun
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Synopsis

This Academy Award-winning feature (Best Foreign Language Film) is a wonderfully intimate, Chekhovian idyll set in Stalinist Russia, which, at its conclusion, packs an explosive political punch. Director Nikita Mikhalkov plays a legendary revolutionary hero living in a dacha outside Moscow with family and friends. Most of the film's complex relationships are seen through the innocent eyes of Mikhalkov''s (and the hero''s) beautiful daughter in a film that gently reveals the tragedy of living under Stalinism. In Russian with English subtitles.

Nikita Mikhalkov---Russia---1994---146 mins.

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  • Currently 4/5 Stars.
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   | JohnH#1

Stalinist Russia was repressive, the powers that were may have been cultural Neanderthals, but when it came to dance, music, theater, cinema, ., nevertheless they must have demanded rigorous training and high standards from performers, directors and technicians, because when the lid was lifted movie makers had the tools to produce some wonderful films. Burnt by the sun held my interest from beginning to end. I've sometimes wondered if the plot were inspired by the death of Trotsky, who was assassinated by a man who wormed his way into his confidence.

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  • Currently 4/5 Stars.
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   | Lewis#4

It is well known that, as part of Stalin's lethal house-cleaning in the late 1930's, a significant segment of the Red Army leadership, a repository of military expertise that might have faced down Hitler in 1941, was cruelly liquidated. This 1994 film by Nikita Mikhalkov puts a human face on this tragedy. That face is his own, as he plays the Soviet war hero Colonel Sergei Petrovich Kotov, a sturdy, blustery leader of men, but also a humane, kindly family man. (His credentials as a loving father are established by an exquisite scene as he and his young daughter, played by the director's real-life daughter, float down a river in a skiff.) At their country dacha, on a sun-gilded summer day, the Colonel and his beautiful wife play host to a Chekhovian gaggle of relatives and friends, an assemblage of diverting buffoons and eccentrics. The disruptive note here is struck by the charismatic Mitya (a handsome Oleg Menshikov). He charms one and all, especially the wife and daughter, and is seen initially as a threat to marital bliss. But his purpose, we eventually learn, is darker. He is the advance man for burly goons, Party enforcers who would not be out of place in an American gangster film. This film takes its time (over two hours) in telling its story, establishing a dream of bourgeois bliss, and making us care for its characters. Then comes the sledgehammer.

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