Esclave de l'amour

Despite some nice photography and a mildly amusing if cartoonish nod to pre-soviet melodramatic Russian cinema, the good/bad PC politics sink this as soon as the message kicks in. Those wonderful (and so handsome!) Bolsheviks, always out to make the world a better place for the sick and the children. Neat that they courageously go forth to document White atrocities. Too bad they didn't have enough film stock to document what the Bolchies did, eh? as in the Ukraine in 33-34.

"Raba lyubvi" - called "Slave of Love" in English - portrays silent screen star Olga Voznesenskaya (Yelena Solovey) getting caught up in the 1917 revolution. She's trying to reconnect with a former lover, but the surrounding events complicate everything. What the movie's title shows is that Olga is not only a slave of love, but also of world events, of her career, and of her fans (I guess that even under communism - or whatever it was - people turn into celebrity fetishists!). As often happens in Soviet-era movies, there's a lot of exaggerated facial expressions. Director Nikita Mikhalkov appears as a waiter.

The good old Mikhalkov-Adabashian-Lebeshev trio means that you get expert - and a bit Western- directing, masterly done design and great camerawork. The cast is superb. There is a great deal of suspense in this movie although the counter-espionage is a mere backdrop for a more reflective look at human nature during the trials and tribulations of love and war.

Well-acted, nicely photographed, believable, this near-melodrama is remarkable for its comparatively realistic portrayal of character and personality on each side in the Russian Civil War (which immediately followed the second Russian Revolution, Lenin's Bolshevik take-over in the Autumn of 1917). See it, though, not so much for a surprising insight into crumbling Soviet ideology in 1976 (so early!) as for a very human, very touching love story.

A fascinating film not only about the making of a silent film in Revolutionary Russia, but by extension, about the inability of humans to see beyond their primary interests, to ignore the wave of history until it all but sweeps over and engulfs them.

To a viewer accustomed to linear storytelling and sophisticated technique, this helter-skelter development of a love story between a somewhat scatterbrained actress and her quietly subversive cameraman may seem disjointed until the revolutionary movement intrudes and the violence of history intrudes into their country dream. Slave to Love is an odd little film, an immersion into the myths of another country, and while I wouldn't watch it twice, it's sincerity of purpose is evident.