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Did you people see the same film I saw?

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

Russia, 1936: revolutionary hero Colonel Kotov is spending an idyllic summer in his dacha with his young wife and six-year-old daughter Nadia and other assorted family and friends. Things change dramatically with the unheralded arrival of Cousin Dmitri from Moscow, who charms the women and little Nadia with his games and pianistic bravura.Russian history is strange, especially for Americans. Was the end of the monarchy a good thing? How about the rise of Lenin? Or the takeover from Stalin? Depending on who you believe, any of these three could be heroes or demons. This film is set during the rise of Stalin, still a few years off from World War II.How accurate it is, I do not know. But it seems like a nice time to be a Russian. Perhaps even better than today (2015). Or maybe just a good time to be an important military figure.

This masterpiece of a psychological drama done in the immediate post-soviet Russia is very hard to review, for fear of saying too much.First let's say that the author clearly wants to give stalinist Russia its due. But there's much more depth to it than that ; this film is first and foremost about destiny, how fate can ruin even the most well-meaning and virtuous lives. It is also about guilt and remorse, in a very subtle way.In 1936, in Soviet Russia's countryside, a Red Army Colonel, loving husband and father of a little daughter, a dignified and proud man, receives a visit from an eccentric, playful and handsome man, to the great joy of the other residents of the house, who know him well, for he had lived in the place many years ago.Through the eyes of the little girl, in the span of one summer day, a drama will unfold...But who is the real culprit? The mysterious man (Oleg Menshikov, who gives a memorable performance!)? The stalinist system? And what about the immaculate Colonel (impeccably played by the Director, Nikita Mikhalkov)? Is he so really virtuous after all? Doesn't he have, he also, a dirty little secret which changes everything?Once again, to say too much would be counter-productive...Just for the immense performance, of Oleg Menshikov, up to its heart-wrenching conclusion, this film is worth watching...A must-see.

You can see why this got the best foreign language Oscar: an anti-communist Russian film - the Americans must have been purring. It's a decent film, basically sentimental (like The Pianist) though nothing to rave about. The General's tender relationship with his wife and child, with which we are beaten around the head for a couple of hours, is far less interesting than the almost shocking idea of post-revolutionary Russia in shimmering colour, where the sun still shines and people still picnic by the river - looking nothing at all like Eisenstein et al had it.Apparently, folks still hung out at the dacha in those days, and here we have the usual genteel bunch in white flannels as if transplanted from a Bergman film. Mikhalkov wants us to know and like them all, but the film would be leaner and better without the extra baggage. Plenty of scenes are vaguely unsatisfactory, like a joke told by someone you don't like. There is a "fireball" motif which doesn't work at all. But the real problem is that all the scene-setting means two hours of beating around the bush (literally, in some scenes), in order to set up the powerful and moving final ten minutes, which has beating of another kind, and which appears to come straight out of the Coen brothers.

Blind faith in anything is dangerous; it can come back to haunt you in a big way- as it does the character(s) in this movie. I've lived my life questioning everything. Or, as the Greeks put it: "Believe none of what you hear and half of what you see." It's gotten me this far. Still, to this very day, I know people who have put total, blind faith in institutions as ephemeral as politics and religion. Fool's games, if you ask me, one and all. Like the belief in fairy tales. BURNT BY THE SUN is an object lesson in believing in things you don't really understand. It's okay to think that you've seen the light; it's quite another to be blinded by it.