Burnt by the Sun by Nikita Mikhalkov (1994)(Utomlyonnye solntsem)Warning: contains spoilersThe film starts with a view of the Kremlin and shows someone cleaning the streets around it on a calm morning, as a warning of what is to come. Dima (Oleg Menshikov) comes home obviously perturbed, the reason for which becomes clear much later in the film. The film moves to the idyllic dacha where Kotov (Mikhalkov hiself) is in the bathhouse with his wife Maroussia and daughter Nadya. These pastoral scenes are interecut with tanks destroying farms, and farmers running for help. The mood of the film is set: private farms are being destroyed, since no one but the state can own farmland. This is a way of life being destroyed, and the sufferers are the very people who believed that communism was their way of life. The Kotov family's bath is interrupted and Kotov comes to rescue, where all he has to do is to identify himself for the soldiers to salute him and to stop destroying the fields. Superficially, this seems like the normal Hollywood mini-climax at the beginning of the film where the hero comes to rescue someone in distress , and you see him in action as a taste of things to come further on in the film. Here, however, the battle lines are drawn, and the end is inevitably in sight: an ardent believer of Communism, a strong personality if ever there was one, who knows Stalin personally, is going to fight for the romantic ideal of Russia that he believes in, at the cost of losing everything he loves to the behemoth that Stalinist Russia has become: his reputation, his family, his life, and the very soul of Russia itself - all is going to be lost.
Kotov's in-laws get introduced slowly, and the quaint goings-on in that bourgeois family show old-world East Europeans at their charming best. This is a way of life that became outdated with the Communist revolution, and setting Kotov amongst them is a stroke of genius. Throughout the film, Kotov - the son of soil who rose to great heights in Communist Russia - seems out of place in this family. He can not share with his in-laws their love of France, in the form of anything from old bottles of French medicine to the French cancan. The only thing Kotov shares with his in-laws is what he loves: his wife and his daughter, the lissome beauties that stand as a metaphor for Russia herself: her past and her future, standing innocent, about to become victims of her troubled present. The stage is set for Mitya's entry or, rather, his re-entry.
It is significant that Mitya comes in the seemingly playful disguise of a Santa, as if this is just a little game for children, and that he encounters the little Nadya first. She is charmed by his personality: the innocent Russia welcoming even its executioner. Kotov is not so lucky: as Mitya
receives a warm welcome back in his family, Kotov not just knows what is coming, but their relationship is further strained by the fact that Mitya used to serve in the white army, opposing the revolution, and that it was Kotov, from the victorious red army, who had sent him in exile, and who has married his cousin and former lover, Maroussia. Not unsurprisingly, Mitya had gone to France. Maroussia had unsuccessfully attempted suicide. She is happily in love with Kotov now, but all this is about to change. The beginning of the film makes more sense now. In the first scene with Mitya, he is shown to have a servant who speaks in French with him. It is a sign of Mitya's bourgeois origins as well as of his predicament: in order to come back to his homeland, and survive the Communists there, he must not only deny his origins, but also destroy his past in more ways than one. This emphasizes Maroussia's (and the sweet little Nadya's) place firmly in the film's canvas - everyone loves Russia, but some are bound to destroy her, despite their love for her.
The scene between Kotov and Nadya in the lake is brilliant and moving - he knows that this life is about to end, but he can not tell anyone so yet, let alone Nadya. Life seems easy for Nadya, with her love for her father and mother. Kotov's playing the normal, reassuring, affectionate father with her, when coupled with Mikhalkov's performance, subtly hinting at the trauma within, is one of those unforgettable scenes that justify cinema as an art form. Nadya is at her disarming best, too. Mikhalkov has confessed in an interview to have played Kotov only to put his daughter at ease, but that is modesty on his part. In parallel, there is the confrontation between Mitya and Maroussia among reeds, with references to Hamlet, betraying his predicament - caught as he is between his love for Maroussia (and now his fondness for Nadya), his hatred and jealousy for Kotov, his need to justify himself both to Maroussia and to Russia herself, and the knowledge of the horrors this would bring to the family.
There are many tender scenes between Mitya and Nadya, too, that develop a loving bond between the executioner and the unintended victim: for example, when Mitya teaches Nadya to play Strauss's Blue Danube. Throughout the film, Mitya's predicament is poignantly portrayed, and it is impossible not to feel sorry for him at the end. This universal compassion for what the Russians had to go through is what makes the film brilliant. There are no easy targets for hatred here, not even the bored NKVD men, who wait for Kotov at the end, perplexed and made uncomfortable by the ease and by the independence (almost insolence) of Nadya when she confronts them in all innocence.
A discussion of the film would be incomplete without mentioning some of the potent symbols used: the menacing, eerie gas masks used at the beach by volunteers to train people how to escape a chemical attack (when people should be scared of something else - the ardent followers of communism that the volunteers are. Or, the enthusiastic pioneers whom Nadya watches with a simple, child's longing to join them, but whose march music is unimpressive, dull, uniform, compared to the music played within the family. Then there is the red balloon celebrating a Soviet achievement, which is under preparation throughout the film and which rises mockingly towards the end of the film, when all is lost. And, of course, the man with his luggage loaded on a truck, looking for his village. He keeps appearing throughout the film, asking people for the way to a village that no one knows about. He cuts an absurd, tragic, lost figure, looking for Russia's soul, but all he ends up with is being a passive witness to Kotov's (and Russia's) destruction.
This is a multi-layered, stunning, disturbing, yet lyrical film that manages to celebrate the Russian soul, celebrating life itself, despite the horror that life can be. There are excellent performances, most notably by Nikita Mikhalkov himself, by his daughter playing Nadya and by Oleg Menshikov as Mitya. Superficially, the film can seem just a critique of the Stalinist purge of Russia in the 1930s. However, it is made heart-wrenching because it is not unjust to or harsh on either the Russian common people who believed in the communist ideal, or the bourgeoisie. This is quite an accomplishment, since there are enough horror stories in Communist Russia to depict the communists as evil, and the Russians as helpless victims of it. As Kotov says when arguing with Mitya, you always have a choice, and Mikhalkov seems to ask us and contemporary Russians to understand their past with empathy and compassion. The ray of hope for Russia comes at the end of the film, when we are told that Nadya was rehabilitated, and lives as a music teacher, signifying that all is still not lost.
Post-war France at its best and worst - the communists trying to prove their patriotism by catching collaborators, everyone trying to prove their innocence with someone else's guilt, with the inevitable results - some innocents are punished and some guilty remain unpunished but not very happy either. A very theatrical production featuring some of the greatest contemporary French actors: Gérard Depardieu as a touching bar owner who is passionate about alcohol and Racine, in that order, Philippe Noiret as a cynical but happy professor, Michel Blanc as a level-headed but headstrong communist, Michel Galabru as a war profiteer, and Jean-Pierre Marielle as a Petainist with a guilt conscience. As a bonus, a very young Fabrice Luchini plays a communist from a bourgeois background and the baggage that comes with it. All in all, the kind of Cinema of Quality that Truffaut and his fellow new wave directors abhorred, but that thrives in France and is popular the world over. A kind of Merchant-Ivory production in the French tradition.
A brilliant film from a brilliant director. The crumbling of a former oligarchy during the communist regime. The son is in denial of his bourgeois roots, but can't really escape who he is. Excellent performances by two giants of Polish cinema - Daniel Olbrychski and Maja Komorowska as the son and daughter of the oligarch.
