Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was one of the few good news stories in Russian cinema in the Nineties. Made with his longterm scriptwriter Rustam Ibragimbekov, it picked up a main prize at Cannes in 1994 and the Best Foreign Film Oscar the following year. Its small Chekhovian story - adapted later by Peter Flannery for a successful run at London’s National Theatre - resounded far above its weight.
Red Army hero-general Sergei Kotov (Mikhalkov himself, a fine actor, main picture) felt the chill winds of the Stalinist 1930s. The reappearance of Mitya (Oleg Menshikov), a friend now turned NKVD-betrayer, disrupted the balmy mood of summer holiday life enjoyed with his younger wife Marussiya and daughter, Mitya’s motives tied up not least with past feelings for Kotov's wife. A gaggle of elderly relations straight out Chekhov provided additional comic tone.
It ended with Kotov, badly bloodied, being taken off to an assumed death in the gulag. Until the director had the idea to commute this sentence, and bring Kotov back from the camps to fight heroically in the Great Patriotic War. It’s a decision viewers may rue, as nearly two decades later we’re dealing with the bombastic debris that was its follow-up, as this double-disc DVD release of the two sequels, reveals. The first sequel, Exodus, premiered to local fanfare in 2010 only to be resoundingly rejected by Russian viewers; the second, Citadel, came along the following year (and didn’t repeat the original’s Oscar success, despite a nomination).
What went wrong? Scriptwriter Ibragimbekov, who knew how to tell a story rather than a heroic tract, left the project. The arrival of computer special effects expanded visual opportunities catastrophically. Mikhalkov, meanwhile, felt the allure of power and set himself up as a public figure expecting viewers to hang on his every pronouncement. They didn’t. The sense of acting as loud as its battle scenes are long could hardly be further from the first film, with no one telling the director when enough was enough (as much on the taste as on the length front).
The two films on this DVD release are in the versions shown internationally, with Exodus cut by half an hour or so from its Russian release – it still comes in at just short of two and a half hours. Citadel is no shorter, though seems somewhat more tightly plotted, and has a welcome interlude that returns to the eccentric family atmosphere of the very first film, which seems a world away indeed from the conflict of war.
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