This film is good in parts - it's genuinely interesting, and when it allows the plot to break through the theatrical overacting and alleged 'comedy' (maybe you gotta be Russian to get it?) the film sparks to life. Set in the early 30s, it tells the story - true, and so true for so many others - of what happens when people live in a dictatorship: the betrayal (personal and political), the shifting sangs of allegiance, the hypocrisy, the paranoia, the misery and bleak existence that so many lived through. Way too long, and the subtitles are ropey - and a few dates on screen would have helped - but still well worth a watch for any who perhaps believe that communism was ever glorious or good for 'the people' against 'imperialism' (I saw parallels with Islamic paranoia today actually). The last scenes are almost of classic status.
This is an exceptional film. The acting, the direction, the photography, all create an evocative atmosphere of a part of Russian history.In the very realistic portrait of a family there is tenderness, humour, tension, and through all the dark undercurrent of life lived under Stalin. Definitely worth watching more than once.
A 5star film that surely venerates the domestic detail of a Chekov short story, capturing a day in the life of an old War hero, his young wife and child, surrounded by a bourgeois flotilla of theatrically eccentric uncles, aunts. Are they all protecting the innocence of the delightfully precocious child from the darker reality of Soviet history? This day starts with the villagers protesting about the Soviet tanks on manoeuvre across their fields and develops a gentle slapstick comedy with the arrival at the dacha of a mysteriously disguised old man whose presence becomes the watershed reversal of the family’s fortunes……they are about to be burnt by the Sun that has protected them.