ericoblair

Proust meets "Groundhog Day" in a Donbass coal mining town of Stalinist Russia, with a soundtrack featuring Nautilus Pompilius doing "Goodbye America" – is it any wonder that Khotinenko's Mirror ranks as one of a half-dozen perestroika-era movies that have achieved must-see status for Russians, ex-Soviets, never-were-Soviets and the rest of us?

The high-dome version: Zerkalo/Mirror said two things well in 1987 and just as well today: (1) the past is more complex than you thought; and (2) you can't fix it but you can understand it better – which makes empathy possible and reconciliation within reach.

To describe much more is to deprive Mirror of some of its power to surprise, so enough said – OK, plus these extra credit questions: 1. Does the Mirror of the title reflect (as it were) A. Tarkovsky's Mirror of 1974? And 2. Is somebody trying to further Perestroika II by putting Perestroika I movies like this one on prime-time Moscow TV so frequently of late, as the reports have it? Isn't that a nice conspiracy theory to contemplate, for a change?

Sorry, I dozed off for a minute just *thinking* about this one. Which is hardly surprising, since my girlfriend and I literally dozed off watching the video last night-- and have no desire to try revivifying "Arn" again this evening.

There are some commendable production values on display here from time to time, and perhaps these are significantly augmented during in-theatre presentations. But no venue is capable of injecting nuance, breadth or development generally into the opaque characters who march through this thing, most especially the hero.

In short, the endless, sententious and overblown "Arn" comes across like an epic dreadfully in need of an attack by the Monty Python company. Otherwise, bring a pillow.

Soviet cinema (and other art forms) spent 70 years mythologising the Russian Civil War of 1918-1921, with special attention paid to creating Bolshevik heroes (galore) and demonising their opponents (of all stripes). The cinematically tiresome and historically ludicrous results are still showing on Russian television, and will likely be for decades-- which makes one wonder what children growing up without ever having known the Soviet Union can possibly make of them. Why, they must ask themselves, are the Bolsheviks still heroes on TV when we know they weren't in history?

A film like Gospoda Ofitsery: Spasti Imperatora (Officers and Gentlemen: To Save the Emporer) makes a modest contribution toward redressing the balance. It's far from great cinema; it is, instead, cinema that tries hard, if you will, to entertain and de-ideologise at the same go. Here and there it succeeds. It clearly had a respectable budget and some moderately well-known actors, plus a special effects unit that could do a creditable job with battles scenes and explosives.

The plot involves a commando group of officers detailed to save the lives of the imprisoned Romanov family. There are several sequences which tell a good story in themselves, but the whole of the film is really not impressive or sustained movie-making. Briefly put, the signal virtue of this production is its point of view: the heroes are the actual good guys and the villains the actual bad guys. And in the context of Russian history-as-presented-in-the-cinema, that counts for a good deal.

One hopes that another Russian Civil War blockbuster, "Kolchak" -- due to be released shortly -- can add rather more to this step in the right direction.