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The Barber of Siberia (1999)

Director: Nikita Mikhalkov

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From Time Out Film Guide

Jane Callahan (Ormond), a go-getting, worldly wise American woman, falls in love with a proud but naive young Russian cadet (Menshikov) she meets in Moscow in the 1880s. The affair ends badly. What Chekhov would have dealt with in a few pages, writer/director Mikhalkov takes three hours to tell. (His original cut was reportedly twice as long.) The casting is perverse. Mikhalkov has hired an English actress to play an American and a 40-year-old as the juvenile lead. The director himself has a small cameo as the Tsar. The 'Barber' of the title is a giant wood-cutting contraption invented by the eccentric McCracken (Harris) to raze the Siberian forests. He needs the Grand Duke's backing to get the machine up and running, and is using Ormond as bait. To emphasise how vast, contradictory and magnificent Mother Russia really is, Mikhalkov throws in scenes of drunken Generals, dancing bears, cadets fighting Pushkin-like duels, postcard imagery of the grandest Moscow buildings, and shots of the untamed Siberian landscape. Like McCracken's hissing, spluttering machine, the film is lumbering and unwieldy.

Author: GM 0000-00-00 00:00:00

Time Out Film Guide

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marie adams said...

Posted on Jan 14 2009 12:49 Oh yes - the dreadful bits were dreadful but the splended bits were more than splendid and in the majority. The main character is Russia and it s character. The trees were Milhalkov's final cast - so rich in beauty and nobility - emblematic of Russia herself. Yes. it was too theatrical - but in the same way as a 1950s Hollywood musical. I laughed out loud. But mostly it was a socialist movie made by a socialist director who is passionately in love with his country - so that I had to sheild my eyes from the horror of the murder of the majestic the trees . Three hours too long! I could have watched it forever - such beauty! But the American temptress brings with her the Amerian capitalist indiscriminate saw. Pity about Julia Ormonde ! For that it loses 2 stars.

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