Xenia Prilepskaya writes in the Moscow Times that Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt By The Sun 2 faces an uphill battle at Cannes after what she calls “the film’s mauling at the box office and by the press in Russia.”
One of the most devastating critiques was by writer Dmitry Bykov in Novaya Gazeta. “Mikhalkov’s cinematography is a weird substance that contains Soviet, Russian and evangelical symbols, Stalin and anti-Stalin cliches, pieces of somebody else’s concepts and quotes from somebody else’s masterpieces,” he wrote. “There is not a hint of solidity and sense. It is purely a disintegration of consciousness that has lost any understanding of the world and of itself.”
Mikhalkov appears not to be dismayed by the bad press — and it’s not all bad press, as the reliable sycophants at TV Novosti prove. The St. Petersburg Times likewise swooned at the Kremlin premiere.
Mind you, while I accurately predicted the film’s appearance on the Croissette, I also forecast it as a box-office hit at home — which, so far, it ain’t.
Sergey Loznitsa’s Cannes competition title My Joy seems to be faring better. (By mentioning it in the same post as Mikhalkov’s film, I might be guilty of the same kind of reductionism that led RT to call the co-production between Ukraine, Germany and the Netherlands, from a Belarussian born director, a “Slavic” film.)
My Joy seems to have all the required auteur stripes, plus the added Romanian new wave value of actor Vlad Ivanov and cinematographer Oleg Muntu, but don’t expect to see it outside a festival. As Allan Hunter writes in Screen International
The film demands a considerable effort from the viewer to discern a bigger picture in the fragmentary narrative strands that Loznitsa attempts to weave together in his Kafkaesque parable. … Ultimately, is a film that shines intermittently but is likely to leave the viewer more perplexed than satisfied.
