La fuite

Sensitive, fantasmagorycal, talented rendering of Bulgakovs play "The Run", it has that Soviet film quality - when you watch, you forget that it`s acting.

The film is about a group of people who in other times wouldn't have anything in common, some of them innocent bystanders, some moral criminals. But nothing is straightforward and simple. From Russia "the run" continues to Constantinopole, to Paris, back to Russia. Some of them have understood that they can`t live outside Russia and go back maybe to be happy, maybe not, some go back to face sure death for their crimes, some don`t go back and know that are going to miss homeland forever, some are comfortably well off (are they?) in exile. Sentimental without syrup, tragic and comical at the same time.

It`s Bulgakov ! What else should be said ?

The first half is absolutely stunning. The second one is ok, but the last 20 minutes are bad.

The Flight is a 1970 Soviet historical drama film, mainly based on writer Mikhail Bulgakov's play Flight, but also on his novel The White Guard and his libretto Black Sea. It is written and directed by Aleksandr Alov and Vladimir Naumov and is the story about a group of Russian Empire's high society refugees from the Russian Civil War, eking out an existence in Istanbul and Paris in the 1920s. It was entered into the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.

Lyudmila Savelyeva as Serafima Vladimirovna Korzukhina Aleksey Batalov as Sergei Pavlovich Golubkov Mikhail Ulyanov as General Charnota Tatyana Tkach as Lyuska Vladislav Dvorzhetsky as General Khludov.

Initially, I was skeptical that the film would be able to capture the magic of Bulgakov's words. Unlike the more recent TV mini-series of "The Master & Margarita" ( which thoroughly failed to do any justice to the great novel) this soviet classic vividly conveys the subtly surreal sense of the absurdity of war inherent in the original writings that it's based on. The acting is convincing, the sets are lavish and believable. Some of the set pieces , especially the nightmarish dream sequences experienced by the white general who has been driven quite insane by all the brutality he's participated in, contain imagery reminiscent of Eisenstein. More proof that the Soviet-era censors either subverted their own system or were too incompetent tp percieve and blot out criticism of their regime. Anyone who enjoys Soviet/Russian film should not miss this one.

This movie is another proof censorship in communism is just a capitalist propaganda to fool the stoopid people.