Burnt By The Sun movie review (1995)
A publicist merely has to be sure to invite everyone friendly to the film, while leaving it up to others to find their own way.
Mikhalkov is a good director (he made the 1987 "Dark Eyes," with Marcello Mastroianni as a man mourning his own romantic loss), and "Burnt by the Sun" is not without interest, but there is little original in it, and its visual style owes much to the pastoral style of many pre-1991 Eastern bloc epics in which lazy summer afternoons and lush scenery conceal parables that are somehow visible to everyone except the government bureaucrats who approve the film.
The movie, set in the final days of peace before World War II, takes place at the idyllic country home of Kotov (Mikhalkov), who lives there with his pretty young wife Maroussia (Ingeborga Dapkounaite) and their daughter, Nadia (Nadia Mikhalkov). All is sunshine and joy, although there are certain omens of impending trouble, for example the mysterious fireballs that streak across the sky like heavenly signs in a play by Shakespeare.
Then a stranger arrives. Wearing a gas mask as a disguise, he bursts into the house, amuses everyone with his clowning, and then plays the piano. Finally he removes his mask, and is revealed as Mitia, a handsome young man who was once, we eventually learn, Maroussia's lover.
Why has he come to visit? More to the point, why is he accompanied by two porkchop-faced thugs in a big black car? As he joins other guests and jolly servants in the celebration of the pleasant country day, we learn slowly - very slowly - that he is a government agent, come perhaps to punish Kotov for having frustrated army movements that threatened a neighbor's wheat fields.
The film looks in many respects like "Sunday's Children," the 1994 film written by Ingmar Bergman and directed by his son, Daniel, in which, once again, we see a large summer house filled with colorful servants, irascible old-timers, a marriage in crisis and family secrets. While Bergman's film unfolds like an emotional mystery tale however, Mikhalkov's dawdles with leisurely pastoral details, and a great deal of unmotivated jollity. The ending, when it comes, has been well and long foreseen.
