RUSSIAN DIRECTOR SLAMS CRITICS OVER CANNES ENTRY

Anna Malpas
05.12.2010
news.yahoo.com

MOSCOW – Russia's Oscar-winning director Nikita Mikhalkov on Wednesday angrily rejected poor reviews of his Cannes entry Burnt by the Sun 2, accusing critics of personal attacks against him.

The World War II drama, which will show in competition at Cannes, received a squall of negative reviews after it opened on April 22. So far it has earned six million dollars at the box office, a fraction of its budget. Announced as the most costly film ever made in Russia, Burnt by the Sun 2 had a budget that was reportedly as high as 55 million dollars. It is a sequel to an elegiac 1930s-set drama which won the Cannes grand prize in 1994.

At a news conference in Moscow Wednesday, Mikhalkov acknowledged that the new film "isn't being watched as much as I would like." But he sneered at Russian film critics, many of whom have been harsh about his work. "For me at the moment, film criticism has simply died. It is nailed down in its coffin and should be put five metres down in the earth," Mikhalkov said.

Many critics panned the film, a sequel to the 1995 Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun that follows the same characters through WWII trenches, evacuation and Nazi-occupied territory. "This "great cinema" turned out to be the biggest fraud in the history of Russian filmmaking," Ksenya Larina said in a review for Echo of Moscow radio. "Over three hours, the viewer learns no more of the plot than from a two-minute trailer," the popular daily Moskovsky komsomoletz complained.

Mikhalkov, 64, who is well known in Russia as a public figure and supporter of Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, accused critics of making personal attacks on him. He said he was proud the film was selected for Cannes. "It was a surprise that the picture got into the Cannes competition. For me it's extremely important that the film was selected among the 15 films." But he accused Russian critics of failing to support the film. "How will we survive if, God forbid, it receives a prize?" he accused critics of saying.

The film has already attracted controversy in the Western press. France's Le Monde called the film a "hymn to Stalin," while the Libération newspaper described its selection as "mysterious," Variety reported. Stalin appears in several scenes in the film, relaxing at his dacha and questioning a secret police officer.

Mikhalkov dismissed the claim that the film is pro-Stalin, however, saying that he tried to present a balanced picture. "To erase the name of Stalin from our life because it's frightening to name him or to elevate him as our only hope – both of these are absolutely wrong," he said.

Russian critic Anton Dolin predicted that the controversy would be good publicity for the film. "All this, at the end of the day, can only be an extra factor to support the film," he told AFP from Cannes. "Now it's for sure that no one will skip the showing."