Dear Comrades!

Dear Comrades!

Another film which makes justice to the great 7th art. This movie is a pearl, greatly done in every aspects, script, footage, directing, performing. It's clearly a refined job, it's sensitive and revolting but still temperate, it can be heavy and light and tells a hard and ineluctable event that needs to be known in a very skilled way of filming.

The sight of massed workers marching against the Soviet government demanding MORE Communism may strike many as strange, yet it is just one of the many seeming contradictions here. Director and Co-Writer Andrey Konchalovskiy (RUNAWAY TRAIN, INNER CIRCLE) has fashioned his tale (with Elena Kiseleva) out of a tragic 1962 incident where factory workers were shot at by government officials leaving at least 26 dead. Lyuda (Yuliya Vysotskaya; the Director's wife) is a committee member for the town of Novocherkassk. As an apparatchik, she eats and drinks better than those she serves. When we first see her she's in the midst of an affair with a married official. Her daughter is an agitator at the factory in question. And, her father hasn't lived down his anti-government views from his youth. Lyuda is clearly supposed to represent the many hypocrisies of the Soviet system. When the fateful day occurs, Lyuda is caught in the middle of the literal crossfire. Konchalovsky builds his movie slowly. The details of the bureaucracy are laid out as are the intertwined loyalties which abound. The truth is both impossible to discern, but, seemingly frowned up. Andrey Naydenov shoots brilliantly in stark Black & White and framed in classic 1:37 aspect ratio. There is no musical score, only traditional Soviet music, often propaganda heard in the background. Even with this bleak style Konchalovsky manages to finagle a underlying streak of bitter humor. Chairman Nikita Khrushchev's policies were so unpopular that many Soviets were pining for a return of genocidal former leader Joseph Stalin. Just over two years after the massacre, Khrushchev would himself be forced out of office. No matter how much the events effect her personally, Lyuda is both a true believer and a blind loyalist - and, can't distinguish the two. Vysotskaya's performance superbly navigates her character's (and that of her country) paradoxes with skill and vigor. As does DEAR COMRADES! Itself.

Big censorship, big arrests, tight supplies, shooting at people. Only those who have lived in China and have a profound understanding of its modern history can appreciate the striking similarities between China and the Soviet Union. Especially when the mother of the child is nostalgic for Stalin's time, it fully demonstrates the profound influence of an ideology in which they missed a disguised history when people always had happiness and unity, distinguished friends and enemies but had no sense of the privileges of the powerful and the repression of opposites. So the most ironic thing is that there are still many Chinese people today who have the mentality of being a mother in this play. Shameon soviet, shame on some of chinese.

In 1962, during the Kruchev era, a mature woman with an important local position and nostalgic for the Stalin era, who lives with the privileges of having a Party card, will suddenly discover what the Soviet revolution has become, and how this unknown world affects her closest environment. The film accurately reconstructs the aesthetics and characters of the Soviet cinema of the 50's. Watching it I was reminded of that jewel that is still 'When the storks pass by' (Letiat zhuravlí) (1957) by Mikhail Kalatozov, a clear, simple film, with pristine images, that is very critical of the war but that in the end recovers from its pain to raise its fist and defend the conquests of the Soviet people. In other words, it's a film without twists and turns, that's just the way it is and that's the way it is. However, the resemblance to 'Dear Comrades' ends there, in the aesthetics. (Konchalovskiy is a director in tune with the current neo-Soviet system and one of its pampered artists. On IMdB we can read that the president of Russia took his film about Michelangelo Buonarroti on his visit to the Pope in Rome and organized a private screening as a gift to the pontiff. ) From the first hour of 'Dear Comrades' the director subjects his leading actress to an ordeal of pain and suffering, collapse of her values, fear for her own and for her own life, to show us the corruption of power, until the penultimate minute. What happens at the end? This is where you get the shock: when all seemed lost... Tachaaan! Things are fixed, as in a sweetened movie of the worst Hollywood. In fact the final sentence is 'Everything is going to be better'. To make a political film without getting into politics (and especially without being critical) is a stylistic exercise, from which one can come out more or less successful, but it will never be a solid and brilliant work. What we see is a long and tortuous journey to end up landing on Dorothy's yellow brick road. A disappointment.

I kept thinking of our current times and how events such as happened in Novocherkaask could happen here. In the film a wildcat strike by workers is dismissed by local party officials until it gets out of hand when the workers take control of the factory. The regional government then steps in and is also ineffectual so the army and KGB are called in which eventually leads to a massacre. Poignantly told from the perspective of of loyal party official who receives assistance from a sympathetic KGB official in trying to find her missing daughter in the midst of a town under siege. Well worth watching from both a historical and from a gripping dramatic presentation.

In general this is a good movie that tells a historic sad event in the Soviet Union, great acting which we always expect from the Russians, but I didn't understand the necessity of the two * scenes in the beginning of the movie!! The movie was a little bit slow in some areas so I believe 120 minutes could have been edited into 90 eventful fast paced movie.

Watched on 2021-03-03 Those ordinary people can understand the disaster of dictatorship after they were hurt by devil . Like Russian, like Chinese. If China can be democratized, I'd rather it disintegrate like the Soviet Union.

A woman who has staunchly devoted herself to building a Communist state in Russia in the 1960s is forced into a moral reckoning when the conflict between her ideology and those rebelling against it gets personal. Yuliya Vysotskaya delivers a taut, sensational performance as Lyuda, a woman whose daughter is among those missing after a deadly riot at a factory. Suddenly, big picture ideals and abstract ambitions collapse around her and her entire life becomes laser focused on finding out whether or not her daughter is still alive. To an American audience watching this movie in 2021, it is impossible not to see our own cultural dilemma reflected, not necessarily in the specifics, but rather in the general attitudes. The Soviet Union of 1962 looks a lot like the United States now, with different factions of our country wanting completely opposite things and determined not to budge an inch. "Dear Comrades!" has a lean spareness to it that I liked. It feels like hardly a frame is wasted, and it's all captured in striking black and white. Grade: A-