Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Slave of Love had been made in France, it would not hold too many surprises: the movie is yet another variation on that most imitated of film classics, Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. But A Slave of Love comes from the Soviet Union, not France, and that single fact casts the film in a startling light. It isn't often that the Soviets export movies that aim to be lyrical, sentimental and commercial. One could sooner imagine Universal Pictures releasing a musical remake of Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky-with or without Sensurround...
Once one gets past the initial shock, A Slave of Love proves to be a decent knockoff. Like Renoir's 1939 film, it offers a moving portrait of a society on the brink of convulsive change. Set just after the 1917 Revolution, the film takes place in pastoral Crimea, where a harried group of actors and moviemakers are trying to complete a frivolous silent melodrama. Hundreds of miles away, the government has fallen to the Bolsheviks, but the film company tries to go doggedly about its business. Inevitably, Slave's characters discover that not even artists can hide...
Though the film's show-biz types remain ineffectual to the end, Mikhalkov refuses to poke fun at them. More often he is touched by their plight-especially that of Olga, the movie troupe's star actress. Olga barrels through real-life matters of love, death and conscience in the same florid manner as in her on-screen roles, yet she is more tragic than foolish. As played by Yelena Solovey, an actress of impressive range, this heroine's helpless indecisiveness sometimes achieves Chekhovian dimensions...
Unfortunately the film's screenplay could have used a little Chekhov-or Gorki-as well. Too many lines are overly explicit ("We're like children forgotten in the nursery of a house on fire"); others recall the parody of Woody Allen's Love and Death ("You are choked by boredom"). Mikhalkov could also use some of Renoir's toughness of mind and poetic genius. The Rules of the Game dared to dissect contemporary France; A Slave of Love is essentially a safe nostalgia piece. Where Renoir merged theme, style and narrative into a seamless whole, Mikhalkov...
...diplomat stationed in Greece in 1936, when, as people used to say, the war clouds were gathering. What she sees from her window is a Communist on the run from a police roundup ordered by a new fascist dictatorship. What happens after he climbs through the window is that love conquers the class barriers and she devises an elaborate stratagem to help him escape the country. Later, we are given to understand, she joins him and they both become martyrs to his cause after World War II begins...