Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

Murky remake of the Alec Guiness's serialisations of two novels by John le Carré: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People. A little difficult to follow, for the slow twists and subtle turns, as well as the at times thick accents, but, ultimately, good cinema.

Breach

Rather good. Suspenseful, gripping. Chris Cooper does his usual superb job of understatedly portraying a character; Ryan Phillipe is excellent. Laura Linney's character is drab, and her talent is wasted.

Utomlennye solntsem

Ah, this was a great film. Saw it quite some months ago, and really liked it. Island Trees Library called to interloan it for one of their patrons.

In Stalinist Russia a decorated Revolutionary War hero shares with his wife and child a loving, passionate family life. He is respected and admired by his neighbors. There is an eccentric family, beautiful countryside, and political paranoia.

Nikita Mikhalkov directs and stars as Colonel S. Kotov, a hero of the Revolution, who is spending the summer in the country with his young daughter (Mikhalkov's real-life daughter), his wife and her eccentric family. But when his wife's childhood love suddenly appears, the idyllic summer day takes a surprising turn. A lyrical film filled with beauty and warmth, it is also an indelible account of a man dedicated to family and fatherland, cruelly destroyed by political paranoia.

Film-making at its best.

A woman in Jerusalem

Yehoshua, A. (2006). A Woman in Jerusalem. New York: Harcourt, Inc. Translated by H. Halkin.

I didn't like it all that much, but others did. Travels with Yulia, an NYT review, praised it.

The Novel the Soviets Feared

Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. (1993).translated and with an introduction by Clarence Brown. NY: Penguin Books.

Reviewed by John J. Miller in WSJ on 26 July 2006.

Authors sometimes gripe about the long wait between the completion of a book and its publication. Perhaps the sad case of the Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin will help them put things in perspective: He finished his novel "We" in 1921, but it didn't appear in print in his native land until 1988.

The problem wasn't that Zamyatin and his manuscript were obscure or unknown. Rather, it was that they offended communist censors, who correctly understood "We" to be a savage critique of the totalitarianism that was starting to take shape in the years following the Russian Revolution.

While there is no denying the horrors and evil perpetrated by Lenin, Stalin and their heirs, it is worth pointing out that the reviewer, John J. Miller, writes for the National Review, William F. Buckley's media outlet. A look at Miller's bio is telling; this is from the NR's website's bio of him: John J. Miller is National Review magazine’s National Political Reporter, based in Washington, D.C.

Miller is the author of three books: A Gift of Freedom: How the John M. Olin Foundation Changed America, Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France (co-authored by Mark Molesky), and The Unmaking of Americans: How Multiculturalism Has Undermined the Assimilation Ethic.

Just for the sake of full disclosure.

Shush!

A patron requested this book:

Draitser, Emil. (2008). Shush!: growing up Jewish under Stalin: a memoir. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Wonderful Film(s)

Burnt by the Sun - a Russian film. Picked it off the shelves at Hewlett.Woodmere Library rather randomly (in the last several weeks, and more, I've been looking for the Foreign Language sticker on the spine of DVD or even VC films, starting out looking for films in Spanish, progressing to other languages, too) -- and came up with a couple of gems.

Last night I watched Offside, an Iranian film about women who want to go to Tehran Stadium to watch Iran vs. Bahrain, the qualifying match for the 2006 World Cup. It had a lot of talking -- in fact, mostly talking, but it was quite good: poignant (knowing that women, as the film shows, have a subordinate (to say it kindly) position in Persian society), funny, absorbing.

Utomlyonnye solntsem is the anglicised title of Burnt by the Sun (Утомленные солнцем in Cyrillic). It was excellent. The story takes place in 1936. A revolutionary hero is enjoying an idyllic time in the country of the family of his younger wife. Together with their 8 year old (or so) daughter, they have a loving family core. In the house are also the woman's grandmother and various other family members.

The relationship between father and daughter is expressed beautifully. Tender, loving, it oozes a love I do not think I have seen as well acted ever before; the little girl was amazing. Too, the relationship between husband and wife drips love, yet shows an underlying layer that shows the complexity of sexual-love relationships between women and men.

There is zany action (a Can-Can with three, maybe four, generations of females frolicking and kicking their legs, for one), there are zany characters (a servant who guards her chest and buttocks with a silver tray to protect said anatomy from pinches and slaps). Young pioneers and gas-attack-protecting civil defense groups add to the multi-tiered plot.

Under all this, a political angle is developed. Mytia, a former lover of the mother, Marusia, shows up and add a strong dose of tension. In order, it becomes clear there is tension. Soon it is made clear that Mytia is not just a weird one, not just an eccentric, but the one who injects Stalin into the middle of the picture (literally).

All along there are references made to balloons being constructed for the glory of the Motherland and Comrade Stalin. And a glowing ball shows up; its symbolism is not entirely clear, but clear guesses ca easily be made.

What makes this kind of film starkly different from many, I'd say most, the overwhelming majority of Hollywood films, is that the acting is subtle and intense, the story and plot are strong and deep, and the razz-ma-tazz is minor: there are few special effects; the eroticism of the love between Mariusia and Kotov leaves a good deal to the imagination, and the sweep is grand.

In the end, Stalin's terror is starkly clear -- yet, again, it is not served with the heavy hand that is so prevalent in Hollywood products. A beautiful film; I gave it a 9 (maybe and a quarter, even a half).