NIKITA Mikhalkov has made some greatly admired movies that left me cold (though I missed his famed Oblomov), but with Burnt by the Sun he has completely won me over. It is a film in which we often don’t know whether reality is surreal, or surreality real. And why, in Stalin’s Russia of 1936, should we know? This was the moment when the Revolution lost all conceivable sense and began to devour its most faithful children to satisfy the insane lust for power of one of our century’s two bloodiest dictators.
Colonel Sergei Kotov is a distinguished hero of Bolshevism, a friend of Stalin’s, a leader in war, a popular favorite in peace. He now lives in a delectable dacha amid bounteous wheatlands with his much younger, loving wife, Marusya, and their beguiling 6-year-old daughter, Nadya. They are surrounded by Marusya’s extended family, which includes a great-grandmother and a devoted but benighted maid, made for teasing. It is a summer day of an intensity, preciousness, and lingering sweetness known only where winters are long and punishing, and where such a rare, irreplaceable day is felt as a matchless benison.
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