Audience Member
Konchalovsky mixes the epic and the poetical, and achieves greatness almost in every scene.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
01/20/23
Full Review
Audience Member
If your ready to sit and watch for four and a half hours, you'll see something very fulfilling.
The movie's catchphrase seems to be "They can't exile you further than Siberia." I personally enjoyed one particular seen in the middle of the film when deputes from Moscow have come to take the boys away for the "Great Patriotic War" (WWII to the West). The war has already been going on for more than two weeks and the Nazis are making great head-way in the USSR and are within sights of Smolensk. When the depute tells the news of the war to the villagers, they are unaffected and inquire who has invaded. The scene encapsulates the situation in the Siberian village of Yelan, which is the focus of the film. The entire epic film (over four hours) centers on the turbulent history of Russia from the perspective of a single village isolated in the remote swamps of Siberia. The film begins in 1908, and ends sometime around 1980, marking some of the most important events in Russian history from WWI to the revolution to the Russian Civil War to WWII and the Cold War. The film itself touches upon a number of issues, from modernization to globalization as we see the village (and its villagers) continually effecting and being affected by the times. It is about continuity, tradition and personal lives in a simple village that seems to bear no significance to the world at all. Yet Yelan is a world in it of itself and the lives of its inhabitants, past and present, the inhabitants of that world. It is about a village trying to find its connection to the world.
It is important to note that the presentation of this "evolution" of Yelan is portrayed in rather negative light. Konchalovskiy is a descendant of Russian nobility and clearly has his gripes with the Soviet regime.
The film also boasts some of the most beautiful cinematography and presentation of Siberia.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Andreï Mikhalkov-Konchalovski disposa d'énormes moyens pour tourner cette grande fresque historique dans la plus pure tradition russe. D'une durée de 4h30, le film à été ramené à 3h30 pour l'exportation où ils remporta un prix à Cannes. Malgré que le film se soit tourné sous l'ère Brejnev, il ne souffre pas étonnement de la propagande d'état encore de mise. Le réalisteur y place même un constat plutôt ambigüe sur l'arrivé du progres dans ce pays loin de tout, où le moindre évènement met six mois à parvenir.Un décallage qu'il applique intelligement à son film au rythme lent de cette campagne sauvage d'où il sort une sorte de fascination. Il faut dire que le film bénéficit d'une magnifique photographie aussi bien sur la nature que sur les démesures du progres technique. Une qualité que son frère Nikita (qui joue dans le film) saura appliquer à ses propres films. On note aussi l'étonnante musique d'Edouard Artémiev, allant jusqu'à utiliser des synthétiseurs dans un grossier plagiat de "Shine on your crazy diamond" de Pink Floyd, mais il n'en démérite pas moins.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
I didn't know a thing about this film before I saw it and luckily I got sucked into it early on because it's such a long film (I watched the 3 1/2 hour version, but I know there's a longer 4 1/2 version out there). This epic Russian film directed by Andrei Konchalovsky (whould go on later to direct Tango & Cash and the TV movies The Odyssey and The Lion in Winter) is very interesting and extremely well shot with a great cast. It follows a family in Siberia from the beginning of the 20th century to the sixties.
I loved the first half of the film, particular the scenes with the young Nikolai and the young Aleksey. The first segment with Nikolai and the bomb maker was excellent, especially when they try to escape. And the later segment with Alksey trying to flee from his uncle Spiridon was probably my favorite in the film. The war segment was very good as well. However, though it was still a good film, I didn't really care for the second half of the film when Aleksey was all grown up and the storyline went to drilling for Oil in Siberia. Though the very end of the film was excellent.
I was extremely interested in the Eternal Grandfather and I wished the film had focused more on him, or just had him show up more often. I especially liked the bear showing up from time to time early on, and the shots of the single star in the opening of the forest.
Overall, it was a very good movie, but I just with the second half was as good as the first half. I'm curious as to what the extra hour of footage I missed focused on.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/14/23
Full Review
walter m
"Siberiade" is an admirable celebration of a land and its people told in roughly ten year increments that each begin with a character arriving from the outside world and end with a character departing from parts unknown from an isolated village. As the village stays pretty much the same over the decades, as symbolized by the Eternal Old Man, the outside world is constantly changing.
The story begins with a bang in the 1960's before flashing back to the 1910's as Anafasy is futilely trying to build a road to nowhere that occasionally interferes with his drinking. That leaves his son Kolya alone with an escaped revolutionary, Rodin, who is eventually recaptured by soldiers but not before he helps the boy build an ice boat and inspires his politically. Ten years later, Kolya has grown into a young man, helping his father and learns that the Czar has been forced out. This is not really big news since the new boss is the same as the old boss.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
All the Epic One Sitting Can Take
When we in the US, and I'm assuming people in a lot of other places, too, think of Siberia, mostly we think of frozen, inaccessible stretches of desolate wasteland. Those of us who have read any of the works of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn have a hard time picturing it any other way. (Well, anyway, the one I read.) After all, there is poor Ivan Denisovich, watching the thermometer and wondering if he will be sent into that horrific cold to build for the Greater Glory of the Soviet State and all that. There's the fact that no one got to the site of Tunguska--no one bothered to go to the site of Tunguska--for any kind of scientific study for well over ten years, and when Leonid Kulik finally got funding for a proper study, it was closer to twenty, and it was incredibly difficult for him to get there even then. Siberia, to us, is really big and really desolate, and there's nothing there, and no one lives there except prisoners in the Gulag system. That's shut down; no one lives there now.
Except our story is set in the small town of Yelan (the subtitles call it Elan; Wikipedia disagrees) out in the taiga, the northern forests. It's a marshy part of the region, and the people have lived there for time out of mind, eking out a living from hunting and gathering, it seems. There may be farming; if there is, we never see it. Probably there is fishing. They live there in the forest, untouched, behind their wooden palisade. Our two families are the Ustyuzhanins and the Solominas, who are both rivals and, it seems, intermarried. Certainly there isn't much of anybody else out there. (I will tell you now that I don't remember everyone's name, and neither IMDB nor Wikipedia are terribly helpful on the subject.) Afansy(?) Ustyuzhanin (Vladimir Simonov) is, for reasons even he cannot explain, building a road through the forest to a place called the Devil's Mane. He and his road and his son, Nikolai (played by three people, including Yevgeni Leonov-Gladyshev and, interestingly, Vitaly Solomin), are what start the plot, which goes from the pre-Revolutionary days and on to the sixties.
There is much to recommend this movie, which seems to have actually been a miniseries, at least in intent. There are four parts to it, each set in a different decade. (Actually, Part I has both the teens and twenties, I think.) The town progresses through many changes in the region's history. It is when the Soviets start taking an interest that things really change. The changes only go faster when oil is found, or speculated to be there. On the other hand, by then, there are essentially no young people left. The young men had all been taken away to the war, and now, the young people have started just going to the city, leaving essentially nothing but old women. And, of course, the men who come to drill will not stay, even if the village survives. It had lasted for hundreds of years; the start of the film seems the end of the village.
I was not, on the other hand, terribly fond of the score. After all the meticulous attention given to costumes and sets, having the cheesy synth music in the background seems kind of out of place. Or really out of place. And the costumes and sets are really impressive. As you should know by now, one of my standards for costuming in this sort of movie is not merely how appropriate it is to the piece but how lived-in it looks. These are clearly clothes people wear all the time. These are coats worn every winter, and every day of every winter, until they are too tattered to use anymore. (How accurate are they? I don't know enough about clothing in the region to say.) These are houses built to survive the weather, a wall built to keep out whatever may be out there in the forest. And the road into the trees is what is, in the United States, called a corduroy road, a road paved in logs to keep it above the mud. Just a track through the trees would return to forest very quickly and wouldn't be much good except in the height of summer anyway.
The release here is by Kino, the bastard stepchild company of the Criterion Collection. The reason I think of it as such is that the releases are similar in genre, but Criterion is of much higher quality. This is not the greatest print--or, if it is, the print needs to be remastered. The special features--well, that would imply that there are special features. (There's a photo gallery; that doesn't count.) Oh, I'm glad there's a release at all, and I'm very glad to have had the chance to see it. (Thank you, Netflix! Also Lonewulf, who recommended it to me.) Better Kino than no one at all, and I suspect that, if more people knew the company even existed, their releases would be cleaned up. Though they might have to go the Criterion "movies that don't really deserve it" route, alas. I think Kino sees itself as preserving cinematic treasures more swept under the rug than the classics at Criterion. It's a laudable goal. I just wish they were doing a better job at it.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
02/12/23
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