I need to see the toes
Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 51 Films of 2021
#14 : Дорогие товарищи! (Dear Comrades!)
Andrei Konchalovsky’s stunning re-creation of a Soviet-era massacre, in which Red Army soldiers and KGB snipers opened fire on strikers, is a rage-filled triumph.
Hmmm - a black-and-white film recreating a Soviet massacre from 1962 which I've never heard of. And it's two hours long, you say?!? Count me in! It's all sounding very Guardian, isn't it - but let's try not to be too judge-y about it. Not until I've seen it anyway.
The film follows Lyudmila a local party worker who lives with her daughter and her father in a town where a worker's strike happens - and let's say the authorities don't deal with it subtly. In the course of all this, her daughter disappears and, in the process of trying to find her, some reconsideration of her previously held beliefs has to take place.
All of which doesn't sound particularly fascinating, but I actually found the whole thing a lot more interesting than I was expecting. Yes, it does drag at times (it definitely gets a bit ideologically talky at the end, but that's Russian films for ya, I guess) but overall I found it to be surprisingly bearable (I don't feel the need to use the word "enjoyable" though) and educational without being too lecture-y. It does a good job of depicting the various levels of power that existed within a nominally equal environment and also recreates the feeling of fear that mid-level officers and party workers must have felt trying to do the right thing or. more accurately, trying desperately not to do the wrong thing.
In a lot of ways it's a very old fashioned film - it feels like a old style Soviet propaganda film with lots of shots of workers and the countryside, although the subject matter is very much not propaganda. It's also another one in 4:3 aspect ratio - our fourth one this year and probably the one that most justifies its use for me. It does its retro features well though with a particularly fine use of tanks and classic Soviet architecture. The massacre is also filmed very well - you feel you're amongst the panicking crowd. It's interesting that several of the reviews described it as rage-filled and I didn't get that at all - to me it felt quite clinical in its dissection of the motives of all involved. I guess we all experience our rage differently.
It's generally well acted, but the film lives or dies by the performance of Julia Vysotskaya as Lyudmila given that she's in nearly every scene - and fortunately she delivers. Wikipedia tells me that as well as being an actress, she's a TV presenter (she presents a breakfast show) and an author of cookery books (having sold over a million of the things). She's also the wife of one Andrei Konchalovsky (and some 32 years younger than him), but I'm sure that had nothing to do with her getting the part. Also worthy of name checks for me are Vladislav Komarov as her boss who does a good job of nervously trying to avoid responsibility and Andrey Gusev as a KGB officer with a heart of gold, which isn't the slightest bit believable but he serves to move the story along well.
Listen - is this the 14th best film of last year and would I recommend it to anyone that they have to watch it? No, of course not - but it depicted events that I was unaware of in an interesting fashion which meant the two hours passed considerably less painfully than I was expecting. So if you're in the mood for that (whatever it is) then, at the time of writing, it's available to watch on Curzon. Which I'm sure you've got so you'll be heading straight over there, right?
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