From Russia, A Cinematic Double Take On WWII Era
Director Nikita Mikhalkov's original, 1994 movie, "Burnt by the Sun," won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. The sequel is surprisingly different.
(By Peter Finn -- The Washington Post)
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 31, 2008; Page A01
VOISKOVITSY,
Russia -- In the 1994 Russian film "Burnt by the Sun," the idyllic life of a family at their country home outside Moscow is smashed on a single day by Stalinism. Fans of the movie, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, are likely to be startled by a coming sequel. And not only because director Nikita Mikhalkov has reanimated characters who appeared to die in the original.
The first film, an intimate drama that shimmered with dread, played out almost entirely on a small set. The new movie, part of which is being filmed at this rural railway junction about 30 miles south of St. Petersburg, is a panoramic blockbuster with battle scenes straight out of Hollywood. With a budget of $55 million, it is the most expensive movie in Russian history.
In the sequel, the four main characters from the first movie, three of whom were thought to be dead, hurtle unawares toward each other in the furnace of World War II. And
Joseph Stalin, hovering unseen like a malign spirit in the first film, steps onto this stage as a speaking character.
And what a stage. Mikhalkov, 62, is not making one movie but two full-length films, "Burnt by the Sun 2," Parts 1 and 2, plus a 12-part television series that will track and expand on the material in the two movies. Mikhalkov plans to release the first part of the film version May 9, 2010, the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II. The movie's second part is to be released several months later, with the television version following in 2011 or 2012.
"It's an epic in the tradition of war films," said Kirill Razlogov, a leading film scholar and critic in Moscow. "And if the film is a success, I don't think people will care that it's completely different in scope than the original."
The memorialization of World War II, which Russians call the Great Patriotic War, has become an almost state-sanctified event increasingly coated in a neo-Soviet historical orthodoxy.
New high school textbooks soft-pedal Stalin's murderous brutality such as the purges that nearly crippled the military in advance of the war. The claims of neighboring Baltic countries that they were occupied, not liberated, by the Red Army are greeted with official fury.
And at a World War II conference last month, which was sponsored by the FSB, the domestic successor to the
KGB, there were calls for the Russian parliament to overturn a 1989 condemnation of the 1939 secret protocol between Stalin and
Adolf Hitler that carved up Poland and awarded the then-independent Baltic states to the Soviet Union.
In an interview last week on the set, Mikhalkov said he wants to capture the "sacred" quality of fighting on one's own soil for the survival of the country.
But he said that "Burnt by the Sun 2" is not an ideologically driven film and that it presents a harsh portrait of Stalin, whom Mikhalkov called the "great Satan." He showed a reporter an early cut from the film in which one character, Col. Sergei Petrovich Kotov, played by Mikhalkov himself, dreams of killing Stalin by suffocating him in a cake with the dictator's portrait carved in the icing.
"For me, there is only simple criteria: whether it is exciting or not, whether the audience sympathizes with the characters or not," Mikhalkov said. "This criteria is much more effective than any ideology."
The director was born into a privileged Soviet family. His father, Sergei, a poet and writer of children's stories, won the Stalin Prize for literature, headed the Soviet Writers' Union and wrote the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem. (When then-President
Vladimir Putin restored the music of the Soviet anthem, Mikhalkov Sr. reworked the lyrics.) Nikita Mikhalkov's older brother, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, is also a film director who has worked in Hollywood and directed such fare as "Tango & Cash" with
Sylvester Stallone.
Though Mikhalkov was not a member of the Communist Party, his family's status within the system enabled him to work in relative freedom, garnering an international reputation for such films as "Slave of Love" (1976), "An Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano" (1977) and "Oblomov" (1979).
Unlike many Soviet filmmakers, he successfully hurdled the fall of communism, emerging in the 1990s as a prominent Russian nationalist who railed against President
Boris Yeltsin and advocated the restoration of the monarchy.
Today, Mikhalkov is a friend and unabashed admirer of Putin, who recently visited the set here. In Putin, he found his idealized Russian leader -- the strong hand who restored the country's pride and hews to a Russian identity apart from the West and is suspicious of foreign influence and intentions.
"We are living in a period when Russia is focusing itself," Mikhalkov said in his 2007 documentary celebrating Putin's 55th birthday. Pictures of the sermonizing Mikhalkov are intercut with adulatory images of Putin piloting a fighter jet, routing Chechen rebels and visiting factories to suggest an economy on the march.
"And all of these changes are in one way or another linked with his name," Mikhalkov intones in the film, leading one critic to compare it to a 1976 panegyric to former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.
Last year, Mikhalkov and three other figures, claiming to speak for "the artistic community of Russia," signed an open letter in which they implored Putin to remain as president. The purring missive caused an uproar.
"A new cult of personality is being created," said Viktor Yerofeyev, a fiction writer who debated Mikhalkov at the time. "It reminds me of those sad times when it all began with congratulations and ended in blood."
But the director is unrepentant. "I think the idea of any change or playing heads or tails is baneful for our country," he said in response to Yerofeyev. "When a new power comes in the U.S., nothing changes except for the photograph of the wife on the president's desk. They do not replace the Stars and Stripes with a green or a red flag. But it is possible here, I'm afraid."
"Burnt by the Sun" ends with a written epilogue sparely describing the fates of some of its principal characters. Kotov, the sympathetic Bolshevik military hero who revered Stalin and the Soviet fatherland, was executed. His wife, Marusia, died in the network of labor camps known as the Gulag. Mitya, Marusia's former lover and the complex Judas in this Chekhovian drama, is shown back in Moscow in his apartment in the shadow of
the Kremlin, his betrayal of Kotov complete. One of Stalin's secret policemen, he lies in a bath, his wrists cut and pumping blood.
All three will collide again in the new movie, Mikhalkov said.
"In those times, it happened quite often that people were informed their relatives were dead when, in fact, they weren't," Mikhalkov said. Resurrecting the dead, he noted playfully, is a well-worn fictional device: "Remember
Sherlock Holmes was also killed."
Also returning in the sequel is Nadya, the daughter of Kotov and Marusia, who in the original was played by Mikhalkov's 6-year-old daughter in an acclaimed performance. Nadya has survived an orphanage for children of enemies of the people and is now a grown, beautiful woman on the front.
"She had to undergo so many ordeals during filming," said her admiring father. "In the nipping frost, she had to drag out the wounded men from the battlefield. And it has changed her inner understanding of the war."
In take after take here on a long sunny afternoon last week, Mikhalkov became the character Kotov. Astride a white horse, Kotov cuts through a crowd of Russians hurrying onto a train to escape the German advance in 1941. Among them is Marusia, now married to another man with whom she has had a child. Kotov watches her in silence and lets her go.
"Kotov is burnt from inside," Mikhalkov said. "In this episode, which we are shooting now, his wife is going away from him with another man. He has nothing left. As he says, nothing left except for a huge bunch of Germans."
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From Russia, A Cinematic Double Take On WWII Era
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