RUSSIA'S HIGHEST-EVER BUDGET FILM A FLOP; DIRECTOR CALLED A TRAITOR TO MOTHERLAND

Jacob Dreizin
04.29.2010
russianscoop.blogspot.com

The first feature-length half of Burnt By The Sun 2, the sequel to the 1994 Cannes Prize-winning film by Soviet-era actor-turned-director Nikita Mikhalkov, which cost $55 million to make, has bombed at the Russian box office, playing to half-empty theaters and collecting a mere $2.5 million in its first weekend. The second half of the film, essentially "Part 3" of the franchise but not referred to as such, is expected to be released later this year.

Burnt By The Sun 2 continues the story of General Kotov (played by the director Mikhalkov), a fictional hero of the Russian Civil War who fell out of favor with Stalin and was supposed to have been executed in the first film (so naturally a sequel was not expected). However, in Part 2, an ageing Kotov escapes from a GULAG miraculously placed on the USSR's western border, only to find himself drafted into the war against Hitler as a simple soldier. The film also includes scenes telling the story of Kotov's daughter as well as of regime efforts to find him and bring him back into the fold as a politically-rehabilitated senior officer.

The film is unique among Soviet and post-Soviet WWII pictures in its somewhat realistic portrayal of the catastrophic early stages of the war. For an audience conditioned to mindless, propagandistic war films involving manly, ultra-stoic Red Army troops with nerves of steel, who win every battle or at least inflict a massive death toll on the enemy before dying like Greek heroes, Burnt By The Sun 2 comes as quite a shock. Particularly disliked was a scene involving a Red Army soldier who mistakes German tanks for Soviet ones, then finds himself squashed under a tread, and another scene with a horribly-burned young Soviet tank crewman who pathetically begs to see a nurse's chest before he dies.

It is not too often that a much-loved Soviet-era actor, newborn Russian-Orthodox nationalist, and infamous bootlicker to Vladimir Putin – whose film played in the Kremlin on its first night of release, and is said to have been partially funded by the regime – is called a "traitor to the motherland" or worse by thousands of ordinary Russians expressing their opinions on chat rooms, blogs, and other internet forums. Even Russia's handful of professional critics found in hard to stomach the graphic, brutal, and depressing nature of the events portrayed in the film, and could hardly find anything good to say about it.