Letter Never Sent (1960) dir. Mikhail Kalatozov
Starring: Tatyana Samojlova, Yevgeni Urbansky, Innokenti Smoktunovsky, Vasili Livanov

****

By Alan Bacchus

Part of my own personal cinematic bucket list has been achieved with the release and viewing of this film. It comes from Mikhail Kalatozov, a master director virtually unknown by most of the cinematic world. It’s the second film in a remarkable trio of films, sandwiched between The Cranes Are Flying (1957) and I Am Cuba (1964), three pictures marked by a impassioned patriotic zeal, romanticized melodrama in the grandest form and virtostic camerawork unrivalled by few if anyone in cinema.

For decades, even being a Palme D’Or winner for The Cranes Are Flying, Kalatozov was off the cinematic radar, that is, until the rediscover of I Am Cuba by Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola and its restoration by Milestone Films in the 90’s. The discovery of that film was akin to finding a Federico Fellini, or Stanley Kubrick toiling away behind the iron curtain unknown to the West. Years later the Criterion Collection restored and released The Cranes Are Flying in 2001. Looking on Kalatozov’s filmography I knew of the Letter Never Sent, released in between these two pictures, which made its unavailability immensely frustrating. A few years ago a print of Letter played at the Tribeca Film Festival, but it still remained unavailable to the public at large - until now.

The film gloriously lives up to my own personal hype, resulting in an awesome cinematic experience as moving and astounding as say, Lawrence of Arabia. It’s a simple story of survival, four Russian geologists dropped off in remote Siberia digging for diamonds in hopes of discovering a repository of new wealth for the State at large. Kalatozov’s wideangled and mobile camera captures first the joys of discovery of the propective diamond mine and the horrors of nature's cruelty when the group gets lost in a rampaging forest fire.

All the while a love triangle brews within the group between Tanya (Samojlova) and her lover Andrei and the forlorn attraction of poor Sergei who desperately pines after Tanya. The juxtaposition of this interpersonal conflict against the background of the most harrowing of climates on earth is staggering. But at all times Kalatozov’s weighs the scales evenly between the human experience and the spectacle of the adventure.

The key set piece in the film is the awesome forest fire sequence. For about 20mins the foursome is forced to escape the KMs-long rampage of flames, a sequence marked by impossibly realistic set design and intense visual compositions and mise-en-scene.

Gradually the environment wittles the crew down to three, then two and then one. The final act is unbelievably harrowing and dramatic. The final two crew members huddling together to survive, with no food, no water, and blistering cold winds. There’s a death scene shot in this sequence that is so utterly emotional and sad. At this moment, it becomes just one person against nature in a sequence which has the remaining survivor drifting down a river on a log, virtually frozen, waiting for a miracle. The miracle that does arrive which pushes the film into the stratosphere.

Fans of Cranes and Cuba will find Letter Kalatozov’s least stylish in terms of camerawork. Some of the flashier moves, such as the spiral staircase shot in Cranes or the astonishing long takes in Cuba are mostly absent, but replaced by equally startling compositions against the stark Siberian backgrounds and elaborate choreography of his characters through the thick forest wilderness.

Part of Kalatozov’s modus operandi, which is perhaps why he was persona non grata for so many years, is the strong feelings of patriotism and support of the Soviet socialist agenda. There’s no doubt I Am Cuba is was made under strict propaganda rules. In the Letter Never Sent, the motivation of the four characters to succeed is firmly established for the good of the Soviet people as opposed to personal wealth. And never is there any conflict amongst the group for this. Regardless of one’s politics, their selfless devotion to their cause is so passionate we desperately want our heroes to live and survive.

A shame it took this long for most of the world to find the Letter Never Sent. There’s no doubt in my mind it should be considered one of the greatest adventure films ever made, and despite it’s mere 96min running time, an epic as grand conceptually and thematically as there’s ever been in cinema.

Letter Never Sent is available on Blu-Ray from the Criterion Collection

Solaris (1972) dir. Andrei Tarkovsky
Starring: Natalya Bondarchuk, Donatas Banionis, Jüri Järvet, Vladislav Dvorzhetsky, Nikolai Grinko

****

By Alan Bacchus

Cinema legend has it that Solaris was partly born from a healthy competition with Stanley Kubrick and a bit of Cold War competitiveness from the Soviet government and Mosfilm to trump the West. After seeing and hating the cold dehumanization of 2001: A Space Odyssey, it's been said that Tarkovsky sought to make a science fiction film about the emotions of the human condition. The result was Solaris, based on the book by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. And while 2001 was an outward expansion of the scope of our place in the universe, Solaris looks inward into the human soul and the mighty power of our ability to love.

As a movie-going experience, Tarkovsky does indeed infuse his story with a heaping of brooding internalized emotions. But despite the competitive intentions, the film produces the same feeling of an existential dissertation as beguiling as Kubrick’s film.

One central existential question fills the 2-hour mostly non-narrative drama. What is the moral implication of recreating another life from the dead? This is what has happened to the skeleton crew of a Russian space station orbiting Solaris, a planet seemingly without life, but one that has a distinct supernatural force emanating from its vast oceans. The first 45 minutes are spent on Earth with Kris Kelvin, a psychologist who is being coerced into investigating the phenomenon by one of the station’s former cosmonauts.

Once at the station, Kelvin experiences the psychological and physical hallucinations that have caused many of the crew to go insane and even resort to suicide. Kelvin soon discovers these hallucinations are not projections of the mind but physical manifestations of one’s own subconscious. For Kelvin, it’s the mind, body and spirit of his late wife.

The two other cosmonauts have already experienced this phenomenon, and while bringing back the dead seems like a miracle, everyone fears the worst. These new beings take their energy from the planet and cannot return to Earth. And even if they should die, Kelvin’s subconscious will always bring them back to life.

The ethical ramifications of this scenario are known to everyone on board and so most of the film is a lengthy spiritual discussion about right and wrong. While it’s Tarkovsky at his most deliberate and languid, the discussions are intellectually stimulating, thought-provoking and wholly accessible. There’s also a strong sting of emotional pain running through the entire film, mainly the dilemma that although Kelvin has revived his wife, he ultimately cannot be with her.

The film ends with a magnificent reveal reminiscent of the TV show Lost (actually, something few Losties had made connections to when that show was the water cooler topic of the day). Kelvin finds a new home using the planet's gift of life as a solution to his dilemma, a supreme sacrifice of love, tremendously powerful and profound.

Solaris is considerably less ambitious technically than Kubrick’s film, but Tarkovsky still manages to craft a stunningly beautiful science fiction film. Magnificent production design and liberal but effective special effects put us into this realistic near future world. Look closely though and there’s only 3 or 4 sets used. But with clever compositions, he manages to create the appearance of a fully formed derelict space station.

The scenes on Earth are just as important as those in space. There's a masterful traffic sequence early on, which initially seems like a brief transition image with the former cosmonaut Berton riding in his car through a highway. But then the sequence continues on and on for several minutes. As Burton rolls through the urban jungle, noises cascading on him and us, it becomes a surreal, abstract metaphor for the artificiality of our world and Berton’s desire to achieve transcendence like his brief time at Solaris.

The Criterion Collection disc is transferred from a low con print, not the original negative. It’s a shame, as it’s not quite as pristine as it could have been. But the film looks as fantastic and sharp as it’s ever been. I could never figure out the combination of B&W sequences interspersed with colour, but it’s part of Tarkovsky’s artistic vision, which is unexplainable. Nonetheless, it just ‘feels right’. Viewers have to bare garish zoom lenses, which don’t quite fit into the visual design. But it was the’ 70s, and many great films are burdened by this ugly visual device.

Solaris is available on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection.

How I Ended This Summer (2010) dir. Aleksei Popogrebsky
Starring: Grigoriy Dobrygin, Sergei Puskepalis

***

By Alan Bacchus

When the Russians do tragedy, it’s very tragic. In this austere festival film, we’re in the point of view of an affable and truly bored Russian meteorologist student Pavel stationed in the frigid and lonely Arctic circle for the summer. When he’s not following the orders of his hardass boss Sergei he spends his days (nope, there’s no nighttime) like an immature child, listening to his I-Pod, playing video games and goofing around with anything he can find in the area.

But when Pavel receives some tragic news about Sergei, the fear of Sergei’s rage prevents him from relaying the message. From there it’s a battle of Pavel’s psychological fears, needlessly avoiding Sergei, which obsessantly manifests itself into a life and death cat and mouse chase around the base.

It’s sparse affair, one of those slow burners, complimenting the endless days and mind-numbing isolation with a similar cinematic style. A languid pace with cold and stark wide shots emphasizing the effect of the environment on it’s characters. That sort of thing.

It’s not quite a Tarkovsky world though, as the one key story beat is enough to fuel some surprisingly strong internal and external conflict, which snowballs like a Greek Tragedy into something as emotional, cathartic and wholly satisfying.

As mentioned, after establishing the tempestuous relationship of the workmanlike curmudgeon and the carefree student, the shoe drops when Pavel receives the untimely news about Sergei's family. But why doesn’t Pavel tell Sergei. It’s this moment of miscommunication which by cause and effect snowballs into Pavel’s madness. It’s not hard to understand Pavel’s fear. His immaturity, social inhibitions and complete fear of authority causes Pavel to delay telling his boss the news. Careful choices of words in the dialogue and the reactions of the actors to each other makes this all believable.

Eventually Sergei learns the truth, which causes an even greater disruption between the two. Pavel flees Sergei, thinking he might kill him. Will he or won’t he? He probably won’t but because we’re in Pavel’s now deranged point of view we understand his paranoid flight to safety.

At all times we’re sympathetic to Pavel, we identify with his innocence and naivety and immaturity and so his downfall in the third act, which is partly accidental, is completely heartbreaking. The two actors Grigoriy Dobrygin and Sergei Puskepalis, got well deserved recognition, co-winning the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for Best Actor.

'How I Ended This Summer' was the November DVD of the Month from Film Movement Canada. Click HERE for more info.

The Edge (2010) dir. Alexey Uchitel
Starring: Vladimir Mashkov, Yulia Peresild, Anjorka Strechel and Sergey Garmash

***

By Greg Klymkiw

While it is unfair to condemn a film for what it isn't. one is almost tempted to do so with Alexey Uchitel's The Edge. "Almost" is the operative word, however, because its achievements in a number of areas are considerable and yet, given its setting and, in particular, the vast political ramifications of said time and place, it's somewhat disappointing that the film makes no real attempt to undo the almost criminal negligence on the part of filmmakers (both Russian and American) to tackle one of the most heinous legacies of Communism.

Most of us are familiar with Russia's notorious Siberian exile and forced labour camps via Olexandr Solzhenitsyn's monumental literary works such as "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" or his monumental two-volume work of non-fiction, "The Gulag Archipelago" among many other great works. Alas, the butchery and genocide of 60 million innocents in the Siberian death camps of the Communist regime remains a setting virtually untouched by filmmakers.

A great and sadly neglected Norwegian-British 70s adaptation of "Ivan Denisovich" by Caspar Wrede is really the only worthy film in existence dealing directly with this tragedy of immense proportions. Aside from a handful of mostly poor features and MOWs, a few documentaries and Serhey Paradjanov's unfinished feature The Confession, the Communist Holocaust perpetrated against Christian and Jewish anti-communists and socialists critical of the regime itself in the extreme northern region of the Gulag, account for all that exists in the cinema about this shameful period of Russian history.

At the beginning of The Edge, a title explaining the Russian-German pact with respect to northern labour camps devoted housing Germans in the Gulag, set up the expectations that this might be the first serious Russian film from an established filmmaker to deal with the subject of the forced incarceration of political prisoners.

Alas, it turns out not to be. In its stead is a brawny, macho adventure film about a shell shocked war hero who is relocated to command the only working train in the region and the rivalry between the two men who are the only ones with the ability to drive the sole lifeline between the Gulag and the rest of the world. Battling for rail superiority and the two most desirable female prisoners is the film's central conflict.

This overlong film is endowed with moments of greatness and cinematic virtuosity. but the screenplay by Aleksandr Gonorovsky spends far too much time dealing with the more melodramatic romance rivalries instead of what it seems to really want to do which is - to deliver a bunch of great set-pieces involving the hair-raising, break-neck steam engine races. In this sense, the script needed considerable simplification to bring it into the territory of existential male angst which, in turn. might have actually yielded far more layering instead of the hodge-podge of story strands and character relationships that merely bog things down.

All this said, when Uchitel focuses on the trains and the men who drive them (not unlike how H.G. Clouzot and William Friedkin lavished similar attention upon the trucks of nitroglycerin in Wages of Fear and its underrated remake Sorcerer), then - and only then - does The Edge truly shine. Its fierce, obsessive and relentless.

The action set-pieces which are bereft of annoying CGI effects are harrowing and exciting - all the more so because we're seeing real men drive real trains at utterly insane speeds. Even the long sequence involving the restoration of a train lost in a tangle of Taiga foliage and the subsequent rebuilding of a crumbling train trestle have the same energy as the magnificent train races.

But then there's the love interest - completely unnecessary save for passing acknowledgement. These boys love their trains - not their women. The long hunks of metal powered by fire and steam power are, in a sense (and not so subtly), extensions of their penises - dick swinging of the highest order.

This is first-rate boys' adventure stuff and if the filmmakers had left well enough alone to focus on just that, The Edge, they might have had a great slam-banging action picture instead of a good one. And that might have gone a long way to account for and forgive a film set in the Gulag that all but ignores what that region truly represents.

Than again, even that would only go so far. After all, could one imagine a film set in and around any number of Nazi death camps and all but ignore what they represent to serve the needs of a macho ass-kicker?

Thieves by Law (2010) dir. Alexander Gentelev
Documentary

***

By Alan Bacchus

The mysterious Russian Mob is possibly more infamous and feared than the Italian Mafia or the Japanese Yakuza. We were first enlightened to some of the traditions of this most nefarious organization in David Cronenberg's Eastern Promises. Now, Russian-Israeli filmmaker Alexander Gentelev offers us some intimate firsthand accounts of these "Thieves By Law," an enlightening and entertainment doc with equal parts shock value and ironic humour.

Gentelev first gives us an adequate summary of the birth of the Russian mob in the Stalinist gulags of the '30s, from which a culture of crime with its own detailed codes of conduct and traditions evolved. We learn about the world within the prison, the brutality and attrition of its prisoners, which became the training ground for the country's criminal organizations. Of course, as we know from Eastern Promises, mob hierarchy is expressed in the tattoos on the prisoners, a form of identification or badges of honour. These characters were scary in Cronenberg's movie and the real guys don't disappoint.

It wasn't until the fall of the Communism that these gangsters flourished, exploiting the fledgling free market capitalism to expand their wealth and influence throughout the country. By the end of the' 90s, the Thieves by Law (the equivalent term to La Cosa Nostra) seemed to be in everyone's pocket and by the end of this millennium, escalated their targets from small businesses to the nation's most influential politicians.

The men Gentelev interviews to bring forth this information are a group of surprisingly frank, yet approachable, Tony Montanas, semi-retirees from the racket who have settled down in far-flung locales such as Paris and Israel, but each with a wealth of hard-line horror stories and tall tales of extortion, torture and murder. The most jaw dropping is the account of one of the men who frequently brought homeless people dressed up as businessmen to his meetings, whom he would decapitate if necessary to prove his commitment to his threats.

The deadpan honesty and even likeability of these folks in contrast to their grisly stories make for an oddly ironic and unintentionally humorous tone. That, combined with the low rent visuals and likely unintentional Borat-like music, adds even more working class Russian flavour to this quirky film.

Sauna (2008) dir. AJ Annila
Starring: Ville Virtanen, Tommi Eronen, Viktor Klimenko, Sonja Petäjäjärvi

***1/2

“Sauna” is a truly wonderful cinema experience – a dark gothic horror near-masterpiece which mashes the existential atmosphere of Andrei Tarkovsky with the mindbending terror of J-Horror and a dash of the Spanish films of Guillermo Del Toro.

As a Finnish-Russian co-production its a unique collaboration, set in a time and place virtually untouched in the movie landscape. It’s the year 1595, on the border between Finland and Russia. A long bloody war between the Swedes and Russians has just ended, with Finland caught in the cross-fire. A group of Finnish and Russian geographers are on a journey to map the new border between the two Empires. When they happen upon an uncharted village in the middle of a giant swamp they encounter a dark ghostly curse which threatens the lives of the group.

Screenwriter Iiro Küttner and director Antti-Jussi Annila have a traditional ghost story on their hands, but execute it with metaphysical and at times confusing narrative. It’s a complicated set-up to start with and the filmmakers are careful about telling too much information which we couldn’t deduce visually. The unfamiliar period of history means there’s a political dynamic which takes a while to grasp. We are given few details of the village, the sauna, the history of its inhabitants and the dark forces around.

But the heart and central conflict of the film is clear. Our heroes are the two Finnish geographers and brother, Erik and Knut. Erik is introduced early as a maddog warrior with 73 killings on his conscience. Knut is along for the journey to help him get a job as a teacher, so he can live a quiet scholastic life. When Erik murders a Russian villager and leaves a young girl locked in an underground cellar to die, their divergent principles put them at odds.

The other point of conflict is the relationship of the geographers with the village itself and the ghosts that haunt it. The presence of these metaphysical forces causes each character to have horrific delusions. This feeds the strongest theme of the film - their moral and religious conflict. Some research into the history of Russian/Scandanavian relations would probably create deeper meaning in the film, but we gather there’s a bitter feud between the Russian Orthodoxy and the Scandanavian Protestantism. But the real conflict is Erik’s own acceptance of God and his need for confession of his laundry list of sins. Though the film is vague about the dark forces, we gather it’s that vengeful one, which Catholics are taught to fear. And so it becomes a truly terrifying Wrath of God.

Like Tarkovsky Annila uses the cold and lifeless environment to create mood. But he also has great lead actors to bring life to the two Finnish characters. Tommi Eronen and Ville Virtanen are a great pairing. Virtanen is the great discovery though. Annila gives his character a natural arc of personal redemption and the need to find family honour, Virtanen's hardened and course face appears to be carved out of stone, each wrinkle and facial crevasse reads as the physical expression of these emotional battle scars.

When Annila is not slowly burying the atmosphere and tension into our skin, he’s shocking us with jolts of traditional horror genre goodness. The climax is a terrifying sequence anchored by a great reveal of the physical manifestation of the dark forces. Annila pays off all the low lying tension with great satisfaction. There’s almost no denouement or lingering time after the climax, which can bring up the question, ‘so what was the point of all that?’

The quick ending allows us to formulate the meaning behind the actions in the film ourselves. While all the dots aren’t connected for us, the themes and conflict are clear enough for the film to make perfect sense. I've seen Sauna twice now and it stands up as well on both the big screen and the small. Enjoy.

"Sauna" is available on DVD from IFC Films

Anna Karenina (2009) dir. Sergei Solovyov
Starring: Tatyana Drubich, Oleg Yankovskiy and Yaroslav Boyko

**1/2

By Greg Klymkiw

Hailed as one of the great novels of all-time, Lev Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” has been adapted into so many film and television versions, one wonders if we will ever get the ultimate cinematic rendering of this great story. It has not happened yet, and this new Russian mini-series, which makes its North American premiere this weekend in Toronto at the Kino/Art Film Festival, is blessed with sumptuous production design and excellent performances, but is ultimately, at its best, not much more than watchable.

This oft-told tale of tragic romance, infidelity and social commentary is, on the page, an extremely complex work, yet when one boils it down to its essentials, Tolstoy hung the layers of the world he created on a very solid and simple narrative coat rack and delivered a subtle stylistic use of language to create the feeling of a steam engine hurtling its characters in steady forward motion with all the requisite jostles, twists, turns and abrupt, though always temporary stops.

The simple love triangle involves Anna, the title character (played beautifully in this version by Tatyana Drubich) and how she escapes a loveless marriage to the bureaucrat Aleksei (Oleg Yankovskiy) when she meets and begins a passionate, scandalous affair with the dashing Count Vronsky (Yaroslav Boyko – definitely dashing, supremely charming and a most excellent choice for this role). A brief reconciliation with her husband eventually gives way to a return to the Count and the two lovers are ostracized by the society they both were once an integral part of. Anna, fearing the Count is unfaithful to her, eventually, and in despair, hurtles herself in front of an oncoming train.

That, in a nutshell, is the narrative coat hanger and after seeing many film and television adaptations of the novel, I am inclined to think that the best attempts to render the story visually are the ones where the filmmakers do not stray too far from the simplicity of Tolstoy’s dramatic story structure and leave the dense novelistic complexities aside. To date, my favourite versions of this tale remain David O. Selznick’s production of the Clarence Brown-directed film starring Greta Garbo and Alexander Korda’s production of the Julien Duvivier-directed rendering that stars Vivien Leigh.

Oddly enough, it is the two Russian versions I’ve seen that I like least. The 1967 Mosfilm production of “Anna Karenina” is not without merit, especially with its elephantine 70mm treatment, but it feels like a half-epic; not long enough to flesh out the aspects of the novel usually left out of the film adaptations and long enough to be tedious. This might have a lot to do with the disjointedness of the film and the fact that it’s caught in the horrible middle of including too much and not enough.

This, of course, does not seem to be the problem with Solovyov’s TV mini-series version. In many ways, it might actually be the ultimate version in terms of remaining as faithful to the events of Tolstoy’s novel. And though it is well made and is endowed with an adherence to the text, there is something lacking in the medium it presents itself in. With an episodic structure that features numerous fades-to-black and fades-up-from-black for what appear to be outs and ins around commercial breaks, it lacks the kind of bigger-than-life sweep one wants from the story. While the production seems perfectly serviceable for television consumption, it just does not have what it takes to raise itself to the stylistic heights of either Brown or Duvivier’s versions which both have the stylistic, very theatrical (big-screen) and expressionistic flourishes of cinema.

It is interesting that late in life Tolstoy lamented the fact that he had yet to find a medium of artistic expression that would be ideal for what he really wanted to do. I always find this lament so strange given his ground-breaking literary achievements, but it is a fact that he did indeed feel this way and even dabbled with using the stage to create a multi-dimensional rendering of his prose. Alas, he found that the proscenium was also too constricting. When he finally realized that the medium of film was just what the doctor ordered for presenting stories in a truly multi-dimensional platform, he was in his final years and the medium was still at its earliest stages.

I look back at most of the film and television adaptations of Tolstoy’s work, including this new version of "Anna Karenina", and it is with a considerable degree of wistfulness that I dream and wonder what magic Lev Tolstoy might have wrought if God had given us another century of this great artist to ply his trade as an auteur of cinema.

For more information on Toronto's KinoArt Festival Nov 5-8) visit: www.kinoartfestival.com

Taras Bulba (2009) dir. Wolodymyr Bortko
Starring: Bohdan Stupka, Ihor Petrenko, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Magdalena Mielcarz and Sergei Dryden

**

By Greg Klymkiw

Via the Kino/Art Film Festival in Toronto this weekend, audiences will be subjected to one of the vilest displays of cinematic propaganda I have seen in a long time and oddly, the charge is not levelled against Hollywood, but Russia – not the Russia of the butcher Joseph Stalin, but that of contemporary Russia – a country rife with the sad, evil remnants of Stalin in the guise of former Russian President Vladimir Putin, current Prime Minister of Russia and for many years, a nasty little KGB spy who specialized in rooting out those who opposed the supposed glories of Communism. (And let’s not even mention Putin’s disgusting career as a teacher and academic where he actually used his position to carry out surveillance on students.)

The film on view is “Taras Bulba”, a new screen adaptation of the legendary Ukrainian writer Mykola Hohol’s (the common Russian transliteration being “Nikolai Gogol”) great novella of the same name and a film that chooses to use Hohol/Gogol’s pro-Russian version as its base rather than his original manuscript published prior to his subjugation where he bowed to the will of Czarist Russia to deliver a product more in keeping with the country’s own version of Manifest Destiny throughout Eastern Europe.

Propaganda in the cinema is nothing new. In fact, many knee-jerkers will look for any excuse to trash Hollywood for this very thing. Since its very beginnings, a common charge against Uncle Sam’s cinema has been the preponderance of propagandistic elements to extol the virtues of truth, glory and the capitalistic American way in terms of cultural/political superiority and to defend the country’s constant need to engage in warfare. One cannot disagree with this common assertion; however, America ALONE has not propagated the myths of their “superiority” using the most powerful medium of artistic expression – the cinema. The most common example of this would be the vicious work of Nazi Germany’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels, who utilized cinema to spread anti-Semitism with “The Eternal Jew”, a foul “documentary” that goes so far as to trace and equate the spread of Judaism with that of rats and the spread of the Black Plague. Of course, no mention of Nazi propaganda would be complete without referring to the work of the brilliant Leni Riefenstahl – a truly great artist who delivered one of the most stunning, yet reviled works of the 20th century, her stirring document of the Nuremburg Rallies, “The Triumph of the Will”.

Strangely, the work of Russian propagandists has not seen the same kind of vitriolic bile heaped upon it and yet, Sergei Eisenstein, (surely as brilliant a filmmaker as Leni Riefenstahl) was happy enough to wear extremely comfortable knee-pads as he knelt before the dictatorial powers of Russia to continually afford him the opportunities to make movies. Eisenstein delivered one film after another that not only propagated the myth of Communism and the notion of Russian superiority, but eventually even extolled the virtues of an even bigger butcher than Hitler, Joseph Stalin. (For more on this, see my review of the Kino DVD release of “Battleship Potemkin” by visiting http://www.dailyfilmdose.com/2008/04/battleship-potemkin.html at the Daily Film Dose website published by Alan Bacchus.)

The new version of “Taras Bulba” received a substantial portion of its financing from the Russian Ministry of Culture and while it may bear the trademarks of typical old-Soviet-style propaganda, it is hardly a work that bears the hallmarks of superior filmmaking. At least Eisenstein, Riefenstahl and any number of American directors who generated similar propaganda (Steven Spielberg with “Saving Private Ryan” is a good example) are great artists who created landmarks of cinema that expanded the boundaries of the medium. The mediocre, though clearly competent television director Wolodymyr Bortko (who prefers the Russian transliteration “Vladimir” in spite of his Ukrainian heritage) serves up some sumptuous production value, elicits some fine performances and seasons his celluloid broth of borscht with all the clichés of epic cinema, but none of the depth one might find in the work of masters of the elephantine genre like David Lean. Bortko’s screenplay adaptation unimaginatively catalogues, almost by rote, the events of Hohol/Gogol’s Russified version of the novella, but somehow manages to completely miss the spirit of the original writing.

Telling the classical tale of a Cossack Chief, Taras Bulba (majestically portrayed by the great Ukrainian actor Bohdan Stupka) who sends his beloved sons Andriy (Ihor Petrenko) and Ostap (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) to the Polish-ruled university in Ukraine’s capitol city Kyiv to not only get a well rounded education, but to acquaint them with the “enemy”. He eventually takes his sons to the legendary Cossack “Sich” (fortress) of Zaporozhia to train them in the skill of Cossack barbarism.

Bulba’s hatred for Poland flares even more intensely when he learns that his farm has been destroyed and his wife is murdered by the Poles. He manages to get the Cossack nation to march against Poland and soon the Ukrainians are wreaking havoc and decimating their Polish rulers. Things come to a head when Bulba and the Cossacks attack the Ukrainian city of Dubno which is under Polish rule. Unbeknownst to our title character, when Bulba’s most beloved son Andriy was at school in Kyiv, he fell in love with Elzhbeta (the eye-poppingly stunning Magdalena Mielcarz) a member of Polish royalty. As bad luck would have it, her father is now the governor of Dubno and Andriy realizes that he is laying siege to the city of his beloved. Love, it would seem, becomes the ultimate enemy as Andriy betrays his country and father to be with her.

It’s a great story! One of its biggest fans was Ernest Hemingway who proclaimed its genius whenever he could. Too bad, then, that this film version is so by-the-numbers. That said, even a mediocre rendering such as this one is no match for the power of Hohol/Gogol’s literary prowess and for this we are dealt some tender mercies. Finally though, the movie is a bit of a slog – plodding along its way, but without any of the spark of the original writer. In fact, the tone of the movie is resolutely dour. This is no surprise since screenwriter-director Bortko has chosen to amplify the Russified version of the novella. Without that glorious spark of Hohol/Gogol’s wonderful sense of boys’ adventure and his delightfully, deliciously and resolutely Ukrainian sense of humour, the movie has all the spark of a funeral dirge.

By over-emphasizing the Russification of the original text what we have is a brutal glorification of Russian superiority. This grotesque mockery of a story that, in actuality is a rousing depiction of Ukraine’s never-ending fight for freedom from subjugation leaves us with a very foul taste in our mouths. We are handed one ultra-violent set piece after another – all in the service of boosting Russia’s own notion of might as right. By appropriating this very Ukrainian story by one of its great writers and turning it into grotesque Russian propaganda to try and suggest that the Cossacks and in turn, the Ukrainians, consider themselves little more than barbarians doing the bidding of those who would subjugate, exploit and even perpetrate genocide against them (as Stalin did) is thoroughly reprehensible. Even the occasional guarded loyalty the Zaporozhian Cossacks paid to the Russian Empire was betrayed by both Czar Peter I and Catherine the Great who respectively destroyed the Zaporozhian Sich and forced them to scatter and disband or face death. None of this would have been lost on Gogol - especially with his first, but suppressed edition of the novel and even within the Russified version, this healthy distrust of the Empire boils just below the surface.

Bortko’s mediocrity as a director reaches its nadir, however, in his lame handling of the fighting, action and battle scenes which is, in a word, dull. With fabulous locations, thousands of extras and impeccable production and costume design, he cannot direct action. His shooting style is cudgel-like, but it never has the thrilling and freewheeling quality the action needs. Bortko appears to have everything that money can buy – everything that is, except the genuinely distinctive artistic voice that would allow him to rise above his own mediocrity.

I do reiterate, though, that such propagandistic shenanigans would ultimately not be as problematic if this was actually a good movie, but it isn’t. Saddled with a clumsy flashback structure, a lazy use of prose narration from the novel and a dull television-mini-series mise-en-scene, “Taras Bulba” might stir the loins of Putin-lovers-and-apologists, but it doesn’t come close to mining the stirring potential of the story. Let’s not forget that Hohol/Gogol came from Cossack stock and that he was inspired by the very moving Ukrainian nationalist “dumy” (folk ballads) of the Cossacks themselves. Also, one of Hohol/Gogol’s chief literary inspirations was the great Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott and that “Taras Bulba” was conceived as a Ukrainian version of those swashbuckling tales of Scottish Highlanders battling their British oppressors/occupiers (especially notable in "Rob Roy"). A cool historical footnote is that Cossacks themselves might have had some roots in Scotland at a much earlier historical juncture. Another interesting correlation between Scott and Gogol is that both portrayed strong, sympathetic Jewish characters in their respective swashbucklers - Scott created Rebecca in "Ivanhoe" and Gogol gave us Yankel in "Taras Bulba".

Not surprisingly, the best version of “Taras Bulba” is the fabulous J. Lee Thompson epic from Hollywood in the 1960s. It captures the derring-do, the humour and the stirring, romantic nationalism of the story by adhering the book’s Ukrainian roots as opposed to Bortko’s ill-conceived attempt to please Vladimir Putin. The American treatment of the character of Andriy, the son who betrays father and country is far closer, I think to the spirit of what Hohol/Gogol intended. Ihor Petrenko’s portrayal of Andriy is so dull and serious and lacking the boyish charm that Tony Curtis with his swarthy Hungarian-Jewish looks and magnificent sense of humour brought to the role. The other idiotic attempt to Russify this story is how Bortko has commissioned a musical score so lacking in any spirit whatsoever. At least in the Hollywood version, legendary composer Franz Waxman based his entire score on traditional Ukrainian music and delivered a score that was cited by even Bernard Herrman as one of the great scores of all time. (For my full review of the Hollywood version on the Alan Bacchus-published Daily Film Dose site, feel free to visit http://www.dailyfilmdose.com/2008/04/taras-bulba.html for a full blow-by-blow.)

In fairness to Bortko, however, his screenplay, unlike the Hollywood version restores the odd symbiotic friendship from Hohol/Gogol’s novella between Bulba and the Jewish money lender Yankel (yielding a stellar performance by Sergei Dryden) and, most importantly, the whole aftermath involving the capture, torture and execution of Ostap at the hands of the Poles and Bulba’s revenge and final noble sacrifice. These are all stirring story beats and while I am grateful for their inclusion, I am less grateful that they are present almost solely to provide Russian propaganda.

This new version of “Taras Bulba” no doubt has poor Hohol/Gogol spinning in his grave. I’m sure he never would have imagined that so many generations later his work would be bastardized as a piece of propaganda for the country that even now seeks to consume his Motherland whole and tries continually to repress its spirit, culture, language and people.

For more information on Toronto's KinoArt Festival Nov 5-8) visit: www.kinoartfestival.com