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.

Like the Italian film Life Is Beautiful which came three years later, Burnt by the Sun is an excellent foreign movie combining humour and colourful characters to depict tragedy in the first half of the twentieth century. Burnt focuses on Russia in 1936, just before the Great Purge. This movie isn't as funny as the beginning of Life Is Beautiful, but some whimsical discussion is heard of summer Santas and wizards; there's piano playing with a gas mask; there's a question about leaving the zoo. But this is a mostly serious movie. It shows a very close relationship between a Russian colonel, Kotov, and his young daughter Nadya. Then it bluntly shows Kotov being arrested, torn from her life. In this way, Burnt by the Sun reveals the human tragedy of Stalin's paranoia and purges.There's more- though Kotov is a man destroyed by the Soviet Union, the unfortunate irony is that he was actually a patriotic and loyal Soviet. The scene where he and his daughter are on a boat underlines that fact, and makes what happens later look tragically needless.I first saw this gem in a university class on the Soviet Union. It came with a disclaimer from the professor that sending people to summer homes of Stalin's victims was not the way the Purges were really done. Like Life Is Beautiful, we have to bend realism a bit, but it's worth it. I'm not sure if this movie needed the mysterious orb of light; when I saw it hovering over a field, I asked my professor if it was going to make a crop circle. Actually it was just symbolism. The ball of light and the sun mentioned in the title are the Russian Revolution, and this movie is about people burnt by it. Equating the Revolution to something warm and bright makes me wonder if the Revolution is seen in this movie as a mostly good thing; but this movie shows there were also negative consequences. Orb of light or no orb of light, this movie is still memorable and wonderful.

That rarity: Burnt By The Sun is a film that feels as if the people who made it lived through the period it describes. During an idyllic summer in the mid-1930s Russia, a flamboyant colonel's (Nikita Mikhalkov) household is thrown into turmoil by the arrival of a figure from the past.The ugly betrayals of the Stalin era are documented in as pretty and lulling as any picture to have emerged from Russia in recent times; an advanced degree of historical and political scholarship may be required to grasp all the film's resonances. Burnt By The Sun received the Grand Prize at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, among many other honours.