Word: mikhalkov
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...Chinese master Zhang Yimou sent To Live; the film, which spans 30 years of Maoist hard times, is beautifully observed and performed (the male lead, Ge You, won the Best Actor prize), but lacks the fiery power of Zhang's Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern. Nikita Mikhalkov intended his Burned by the Sun as a Russian Gone With the Wind, a story of country life amid the turmoil of tyranny, but it was meandering and cloying. As for Patrice Chereau's Queen Margot, an epic melodrama set in Huguenot times starring Adjani, it had Hollywood values galore: dark...
CULTURE SHOCK comes to the cinema in Dark Eyes, filmed in both the USSR and Italy. Director Nikita Mikhalkov is Russian, while his actors and their dialogue are Italian. Based on several short stories by Anton Chekhov, the film stars that mainstay of Italian cinema, Marcello Mastroianni, as a womanizer (what else?). Russian in outlook but quintessentially Italian in its characterization, Dark Eyes is a unique and almost dizzying blending of the two cultures from which it is drawn...
Dark Eyes illustrates Romano's saga with colorful acting and superb cinematography. Like Mikhalkov's earlier Oblomov, Dark Eyes is set in an era of decadence. It is fun to see the fancy balls, elaborate spas, mansions and frills that are all part of the scene. Mikhalkov's characters move about in this effusively elegant world with a naturalness which most films about the turn-of-the-century fail to capture. But with its shift from one setting to another, the film almost has the feel of a pictorial travelogue...
Sofovna creates Anna as a somewhat batty, very neurotic woman repressed by her repulsive, narcissistic husband. It is hard to believe, with the background Mikhalkov gives her, that Romano is her first flirt with adultery, or the romantic notion that she learned to read Italian from songs. Still, Sofovna is so convincing, because of the odd twitches with which she endows her character, that the final plot twist is hardly surprising...
That was, and remains, the Mastroianni character. But Mastroianni the artist is more complex, a creator of delicious surprises and subtle tonal shifts. Romano, the ebullient loser he plays in Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes, is a virtual anthology of Marcello males, and the actor finds vibrant life in each of them. In his rich wife's mansion Romano is the buffoon philanderer, tiptoeing toward domestic calamity. At the spa he is the exuberant courtier, wading into a mud bath to retrieve a woman's hat. On business in Russia he is the dapper salesman, mainly of himself. And years...