Siberiade
I've seen three films directed by Andrey Mikhalkov-Konchalovskiy: A Nest of Gentry (which got me into reading Ivan Turgenev), Runaway Train, and now Siberiade, a four and a half hour epic about the village of Elan in Western Siberia from the beginning of the twentieth century to the 1960s, dealing with two families.
One strong aspect of this 1979 film is the imagery. The village, perched on top of a bluff above a winding river, surrounded by dark evergreen trees and a great deal of silence, has a gate through which several characters, in the same kind of repeating slow motion shot over many decades, run down to the river--to escape, to greet someone, or to find out something. The location amounts to a character, bracketed at the beginning and end by images from the most recent story set in the 1960s, when oil begins to gush from beneath the village. The well catches on fire, gets out of hand. Bulldozer drivers move earth around to contain the oil's spread, finally grinding down one of the film's key locations, the village cemetery, crosses falling like the trees so often falling earlier in the movie, chopped down in the making of a corduroy road through the forest.
Bulldozers, men in hazmat suits picking up oiled geese and swans, carrying them to safety as the ground over the dead burns...an astonishing series of images wrapping up a film about progress, about the development of a landscape where people unnoticed by the government in Moscow have lived for four centuries.
In the village of Elan, two families represent the lowest of the lower class, the Ustyuzhanins, and the higher and richer class, the Solomins. One key way these groups clash is in the love Nikolai Ustyuzhanin (Vitali Solomin--the actor curiously named considering he plays someone mostly opposed to the Solomins in the film) feels for Nastya Solomina (Natalya Andreychenko), a healthy-looking blonde with a robust manner and later on, during the Russian Revolution, always carrying a rifle.
These two go off together to join in the Revolution, Nikolai returning in the 1930s with a young son, Aleksei (also carrying a rifle and a hardcore Communist). Nastya, we hear, was killed years ago in the Russian Civil War. Spiridon Solomin (Sergey Shakurov), Aleksei's uncle, says something against the new order of things, causing Nikolai to banish him to the big city for re-education. Meanwhile, Nikolai embarks on a project to continue his father's road through the forest to a strange marshy locale called the Devil's Mane, a place of oil and natural gas. This project is abandoned when an escaped Spirodon returns and murders Nikolai with an ax.
Aleksei, orphaned, drifts away in a boat down the river. Next we see him, he's in the Russian Army, the war is on, he saves the life of a captain who turns out to be Philip Solomin, the jilted lover of Nastya--I assume there are cousins getting married to each other in this village. Philip had left the village for the outer world years before and after the war becomes an important government official in charge of the district where Elan is located.
Philip and Aleksei run into each other again in Elan in the 1960s. Aleksei by then is part of an oil exploration group. He wants to drill in the Devil's Mane, but the government has only given them permission to drill near Elan. Philip has been given the task of overseeing a dam project that will flood Elan and many square kilometers surrounding it. This march of progress doesn't sit well with anyone in Elan. Aleksei wants to try the Devil's Mane but lacks backing. If oil could be discovered in the area of Elan, the dam would be cancelled.
Aleksei, meanwhile, has gotten reacquainted with Taya Solomina, another member of that clan. The two of them had a brief time together as teenagers before he joined the Army. Now, they make love just once in the woods. Aleksei clashes with his boss in the oil exploration group and makes ready to leave Elan. The well on the outskirts of the village strikes oil, but there's an equipment failure. Images of the oil fire at the film's beginning now come full circle. Aleksei saves one of his coworkers but dies in the process. The cemetery, with its dead and memories, gets covered over with oil and fire, progress ensues. Philip is flooded with memories, seeing his father's grave marker overturned. He remembers Nastya, his first love.
Taya reveals to her uncle, Spirodon, that she's pregnant with Aleksei's child, who will be the grandchild of the man he murdered with an ax, a crime he paid for by being condemned to fight the war in one of Stalin's "punishment battalions." Within Taya, a union of Ustyuzhanin and Solomin genes will combine the two feuding families into one.
The movie, like any entertainment lasting four and a half hours, is an endurance trial, but it's doable without much difficulty, since the story remains captivating throughout. The images and overall feel of the movie make the experience of watching it a rich one, with frequent impressive moments and emotional drama. I first heard of Siberiade maybe thirty years ago. I'm glad I finally saw it.
Vic Neptune
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