day eight - Red Terror in Retrospect

'Burnt by the Sun' dir. Nikita Mikhalkov, 1994.

I find it interesting that this movie is named after a Russian version of an Argentine tango song that was originally written by a Polish composer - which was a popular song in the USSR during the 1930s. I find this to be odd, that something as foreign and 'bourgeois' seeming as a tango number would be permitted to be played on the radio.

I looked it up since it is so significant for this film.
Click here to listen on Youtube

I also made a point to find the full translated lyrics, which on the Internet differ slightly from what the subtitles read in the film.
Click here to read translated lyrics of both Polish and Russian versions

I think it's so interesting trying to translate songs, since it has to be done without changing the melody, so often times phrasing is changed completely just so that it will fit. Both of these seem to have a very similar overall feel, but as you can see, they are very different versions of the same song.

In the subtitles Nadya would sing, "Burnt by the sun" followed by a line about the "crimson sea", which I understood at the end scene where her singing is heard while the camera focuses on Mitya who has killed himself by slitting his wrists in a bathtub, creating a literal 'crimson sea' by allowing himself to bleed. This final image of Mitya specifically in a bathtub goes back to his conversation on the beach with Marusia (the general's wife and also his own love interest) where he discovers her scars from when she tried to slit her own wrists, but explained that it had been unsuccessful because it 'needs to be done in water to keep the blood from coagulating'. I found it ironic that Marusia had tried to commit suicide because Mitya had left her unexpectedly, and Mitya did it in the end because of the guilt he felt for splitting up the family life she had built in his absence. I think the larger blanket meaning of the 'crimson sea' lyric translation, at least as it emotionally affected me, was that during this time the 'red' communist revolutionaries were killing so many people, and the crimson red color is significant because it can represent both the party in control under Stalin as well as the blood that they spilled.

The 'Burnt by the Sun' lyric that doubles as the film's title is translated in the above link as 'weary sun'. I think the parts of the film I was most confused by at first were the odd interludes where a small metaphorical "sun" floats around the house, always seen in conjunction with Mitya. At first, I couldn't figure out what that was supposed to be, because it flashed on screen so quickly. I'm still not entirely sure what its significance was, but clearly it was connected with Mitya, in that he was 'burning' down what the family had by his presence in the house as an agent of the secret police. The most memorable appearance of the small sun was when it cracked the frame of the old photograph, symbolically representing the way things used to be when Mitya had lived there as a child before the revolution. I didn't understand why Mitya had become involved with the secret police; it sounded like he had fled abroad, or had possibly been exiled, maybe because he was an artist? I'm not really sure.

I think Mitya was a very interesting character because it was clear that he cared about Marusia and also seemed to get attached to little Nadya (who, might I say, was really cute) but he was there to destroy their lives by taking away their husband and father on behalf of a government he really didn't seem to believe in. His internal conflict is what drives much of the emotional pull in the movie, and the other major contributor is the innocent child Nadya, who might be the only one who doesn't understand the gravity of the whole situation. All of the adults do a really good job of tricking her so she doesn't suspect anything. Even her father, who at first doesn't seem to believe Mitya when he says that the car will be coming. The whole film does a good job of painting a nice picture of a happy family in the countryside and slowly revealing the hidden issues, and finally building up to the suspense of having it all taken away when the car comes in the end and the general gets beaten up and the innocent lost civilian is shot for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mitya's suicide in the end is what causes the small metaphorical sun to fade out and die, but 'sun' could have multiple meanings, that the "sons of the revolution" were being "burned" in the terror campaign when Stalin purged his higher officers, and possibly also that Mitya was somehow related to the people in the house, and that he "burned" them by agreeing to turn them in to the government.

Mitya's character in this movie reminds me of a character Wiesler from a great German movie that is similar to this one, in that it is a retrospective drama made recently about an oppressive regime and involves a member of the secret police. Das Leben der Anderen - in English, The Lives of Others - is about an agent who is assigned to spy on a playwright suspected of being anti-government in communist East Germany - ruled by extension by the USSR. I recommend it for people who enjoyed this movie, its excellent and one of my favorite foreign films.

I think that's all I have this time around.