Alexandr Ilyin Movies

Love blooms amidst the backdrop of czarist Russia in Nikita Mikhalkov's The Barber of Siberia. The story opens in 1905 Springfield, MA, when a woman writes a letter to a young man in a military summer-training camp. He is currently being punished by one of his superiors, who forces him to wear a gas mask until he acknowledges that Mozart was a worthless composer. The woman has an important story to tell her addressee, and our story flashes back 20 years to Russia, where American Jane Callahan (Julia Ormond) is traveling to Moscow. A man who may or may not be Jane's father, Douglas McCracken (Richard Harris), is trying to perfect a machine, christened "The Barber of Siberia," that will harvest trees from the vast Siberian forests. Douglas hopes Jane can charm Gen. Radlov (Alexei Petrenko), the head of a Russian military academy, into arranging the financing that will enable him to complete his work on the harvester. En route, Jane meets a friendly Russian soldier, Andrei Tolstoy (Oleg Menshikov), and the two soon fall in love. Jane then meets and flirts with Radlov, who grows reciprocally fond of her -- enough so that he asks her to marry him. When it becomes evident she'd rather be with Tolstoy, he finds himself shipped off to Siberia after allegedly attacking a grand duke. Merging romance, costume drama, and slapstick comedy, The Barber of Siberia was screened at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

Mendel Krik (Ramaz Chkhikvadze) is Jewish and no longer young, living in Odessa in the 1920s. He has lived a full life already, surviving pogroms during which many Jews were killed, and has raised his family of sons and daughters and started them in his haulage business. Now, he wants to buy a piece of land somewhere and settle down on it with his mistress, to leave all his past behind. Meanwhile, his son Benya (Viktor Gvozditsky) is living a double life. While he still has some small connection with the moving business, most of the time he's a virtual king in Odessa's busy underworld gangs. His loyalty is to them, not to his father, his heritage, or to the authorities, so that when the region erupts in an anti-Jewish pogrom, Benya beats up his father, just as if he were not Jewish himself. This story is interwoven with images from the Biblical story of David and his son Absalom. The artifices of movie-style storytelling are cunningly revealed from time to time: the fact that the Tower of Babel is a small construction being manipulated by stagehands/actors, or the wires which control the fall of a gangster who is supposedly falling a great distance. This film is drawn from Zakat from the book Stories from Odessa by the once-popular but later purged novelist Isaak Babel. Sergei Eisenstein had wanted to shoot a film from this very same material, and this movie is the first drama dealing in any way with Jewish themes since the ban which thwarted Eisenstein. A 1989 film, Bindyuzhnik i Korol (The Drayman and the King) took this same story as the basis for a rather grim musical. The fact that both these films got produced reflects a softening of long-standing Soviet anti-Semitic attitudes. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi