Burnt by the Sun (1/18/19)

     From the very start of this film the signs of the omnipresence of Communism fill the screen. We open seeing a red 5 pointed star on a building, and flags drape over various surfaces. We see the widespread nature of Communism and we see how it beats down on people hard as the following scenes foreshadow suicide and even depict an attempted one. With the previous films we have watched a lot of the time the bad guys were depicted as being lazy, having butlers, and being sort of just generally gluttonous and large. So throughout this film that was something I was sort of unintentionally keeping an eye out for. The character we are introduced to in this opening scene, while not gluttonous or lazy, still has a butler it seems and a foreign one at that and that initially paints him as a bad guy. Along with that we know he has secrets and possible some sort of violent job, we know this from the items associated with him, specifically a razor, bullets, and a gun. This is a really great way to start a movie in my opinion I'm drawn in right away and questioning everything. If the film is really trying to show us a bad guy with a violent past, why does it seem like they are introducing him as a main character? This was one of the most interesting things about the movie to me. The sort of odd views on "good guys" and "bad guys" as we know just as much about the good guy as we do about the bad guy and which one is which is really not as black and white as say Chepaev and other movies of that sort. While in this film the good guy really seems to be Kotov if this film had come out in the 30's he would have been the villain as he was against the Soviet Union. While of course we as the audience see the human side of him it did honestly become hard to pick who we wanted the good guy to be either Kotov, the fun, loving family man, who is shown as a hero of the people and the military, or the tragic Mitya, who seemingly has returned to see his ex-lover and attempt to reconnect with the family.

     We know so much about these dueling main characters that it is legitimately depressing to see how it turns out for both of them. There was no happy ending to this film, everyone and everything is destroyed and the final shots of the movie just really clue into the fact the while all the players are dead, Communism will move on and while that may have been a reassuring happy ending in the previous films we have watched in this one it was just honestly scary. There is so much to go into in this film and while to some the debate of good guy vs bad guy seems easy with not a lot of depth to it I disagree. I honestly liked all the characters in the film and figured them all as good, I saw Mitya's depression and violence at the beginning as more of a sadness over his lost love than of any signs of impending danger at first but that all changed. I saw Kotov as this war hero and I saw them both as the good guys I figured there would be a love triangle with some interference from outside Communistic forces. I figured a faceless army, or military police would be the bad guys breaking up this lovely family vacation but as more becomes revealed throughout this film we learn that the enemy has a face and we know it well and that was the craziest part for me. Not only was the good guy disguised as a character but all the seemingly happy scenes we have seen previously immediately take on a super dark and scary feeling after we learn of the change in character. Each slightly awkward scene with Kotov and Mitya actually turns into Mitya torturing Kotov. That is what I saw most of this film as, Mitya using Kotov's happiness as torture. It was dark and honestly if I watch it again I believe it will be hard to watch. Even towards the end once we know that Mitya is taking Kotov away we see Mitya teach Kotov's daughter in the way that Mitya used to teach Kotov's wife. And all the while they have to hide the fact that one of them will be killing the other later effectively.

     A few things I noticed that I liked was the "bad guys", Mitya's "friends" at the end were all eating and being gluttonous like the villains from previous films we have watched. Also on the beach the people who were shown as okay with this kind of treatment were the ones shown as large and lazy. This was interesting as while the men who take away Kotov in the car are actually bad guys, the people on the beach really are not. In fact in a film from the 30's the people going along with the treatment would be shown as heroes for the cause. The way the film plays with the portrayal of good and bad, and the depiction of both of them is really interesting and the background we have on "Cinema for the millions" under Stalin really increased my appreciation for this film and the way it played with all of those symbols from the 30's.

     This film is just bleak and hard to watch, I really enjoyed it but afterwards I just felt terrible. The scene that stood out to me the most was when everybody left to go eat lunch and Mitya stayed behind and pounded on the piano in his gas mask. We couldn't see his face but to me that scene was brimming with emotion and I imagine he was grimacing under it in a similar fashion to when he saw the balloon bearing Stalin's likeness rise from the field. This film was really a tough watch with so much to talk about but the main things I found interesting were the toying with the ideas of good and bad, and the use of typical 30's depictions of good guys and bad guys to give this film an interesting layer of critique of films and society at that time, on top of the fact that the whole movie is digging at that time period really harshly.