How Nikita Mikhalkov turned stereotypes into a national epic
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Among the great masters of Soviet cinema, only a few were able to truly realize themselves in the post-Soviet era – Kira Muratova, Alexey German, Nikita Mikhalkov. Everything is clear with Muratova and German – they were geniuses, capable of working in spite of and across time. With Mikhalkov everything is different. Part of his success is a consequence of his bureaucratic, economic and political acumen. But not only that. In his later films, he found a language and position that resonated in a special, far from straightforward way with the ideology of the new Russia.
Nikita Mikhalkov of the Soviet era was a conformist, but he was not an opportunist. These are fundamentally different roles. An opportunist, even the most talented one, works to meet the demands of ideology and tries to illustrate the current agenda; therefore, for those in power, he is always a bit of a servant. The conformist is much more cunning. He maneuvers between loyalism and the Fronde, he is completely at home with both the intelligentsia and officials, and as one of his people he does not raise unnecessary questions. About the current situation, he does not say “it should be like this” or “it shouldn’t be like this,” but “it happened that way.” This “it just happened” sounds like a mixture of melancholy, cynicism, self-satisfaction and slight anguish.
This mixture is the note of all Mikhalkov’s best paintings: “One among Strangers” (1974), “Slaves of Love” (1975), “Unfinished Piece for Mechanical Piano” (1977) and others. The heroes of these films are not bad people, for whom everything somehow doesn’t work out very well, they are just a little immoral, quite ridiculous, very attractive, a little stupid. This image of the lovable loser is slyly comforting. It represents a complimentary mirror for a person who has accepted things as they are, decided to play by the rules of the world. Much can be done with this material, and the Soviet Mikhalkov successfully traveled between genres. What you can’t seem to build on it is a national epic. However, in the 1990s, the director set himself exactly this task.
The most aesthetically perfect of the films he made after the collapse of the USSR was “The Barber of Siberia” (1998). This is largely the merit of Pavel Lebeshev, a cameraman who worked with Mikhalkov on his main films of the 1970s and 1980s. When you compare “The Barber” with the visual confusion of Mikhalkov’s other later films, it becomes clear how much he owes to Lebeshev. In “The Barber” Lebeshev imitates the big Hollywood style. This is the view of the Other, internalized by Russian cinema, similar to the view of Russia of the main character, the American Jane. What does this look see? Mainly stereotypes: bears with gypsies, pots of caviar and necklaces made of bagels, fist fights in which counts fight with balalaika players, a tsar-father with a beard and a bully heir squashing flies on high dignitaries – in general, all kinds of game.
If you think about it, the plot of the film itself is just as crazy: a cadet fell in love with a prostitute, mistaking her for a noble lady, became jealous of the general, tore off his wig with a bow and went to Siberia. This is an anecdote, but an anecdote turned into an epic is an absurdity played out as greatness. Jane repeats more than once in the film: Russia is a country of inexplicable actions, a territory beyond common sense. The trick of “The Barber of Siberia” is that the cliche, uttered in the voice of an imaginary other, here turns into an object of national pride. The famous slogan of the film: “He is Russian, that explains a lot” (in the film itself, this phrase is uttered by a grotesque American sergeant). In fact, the word “Russian” eliminates explanations and moves the conversation into a register of delight at its own absurdity. This tender affection for stupidity is an important feature of Mikhalkov’s Soviet films. Here it moves to the level of a national idea.
“The Barber of Siberia,” of course, is not a stand-alone curiosity. At the very end of the last century, Russian popular culture began to invent an image of Russia, but from where and how to look at the homeland was clearly unclear. A simple solution: collect the most comical stereotypes and implement them in the flesh. “The Barber of Siberia” is part of this big postmodern game, along with the “White Eagle” group and the “Teremok” cafe chain. Mikhalkov himself perfectly reflected its nature. It is no coincidence that his film takes place in the era of Alexander III – the heyday of the pseudo-Russian style of the 19th century, which the style of the late 1990s imitated in its own way.
In the following decades, the tone of the work changed. The cinema of the last twenty years, which can be called “statist”, faced a difficult task: it had to invent not a style, but the history of the country, constructing it from a ton of contradictions, fuse socialism with Orthodoxy, reconcile the whites with the reds, place kings and general secretaries on one shelf, present all the stupidities and mistakes as glorious pages of military history. Mikhalkov was at the origins of this trend. The first Burnt by the Sun (1994), with its Stalinist warlord living among the old regime aristocrats, was the prologue to such a synthesis of opposites. “Burnt by the Sun 2” (2010–2011) is its pinnacle.
Mikhalkov’s six-hour war epic is probably one of the most delusional films in the history of cinema. Most of what happens there can’t fit into your head: the march of a crowd of thousands with wooden sticks against the Nazi fortress led by division commander Kotov, the coordinated actions of a spider and a mouse that ensured the victory of the Soviet troops, the baptism of the division commander’s daughter by a legless priest on a floating mine, her striptease in front of a half-dead soldier on the ruins of Stalingrad, a hand prosthetic with a blade, with which Mikhalkov’s hero cuts the throats of criminals, and so on. The effect of “Burnt by the Sun – 2” is similar to the effect of “Notes of a Madman” – this is delirium of grandeur, unfolding against the backdrop of the total collapse of the world. The action of the film itself continually collapses into almost inarticulate chaos.
We can say that Mikhalkov reveals the schizophrenic nature of Russian ideology at the beginning of the 21st century (as, in general, of any ideology): the contradictions are sewn together with white threads, the victorious narrative has no basis. His brilliant intuition: ideology is made and does not need to be hidden. On the contrary, lurid stereotypes about the people and their leaders, about spirituality and courage, clichés taken to the point of absurdity, seasoned with obscenities and prayers, have their own explosive energy. In “Burnt by the Sun – 2” the epic splendor of nonsense that Mikhalkov reveals in “The Barber of Siberia” is fully revealed: Russian victory is a victory over common sense.
Mikhalkov ceased to be the melancholic and witty intellectual-conformist that he was in Soviet times. But he did not become a opportunist – a executor of an order, real or imaginary. There is too much wild visionaryism in his work with cliches and empty formulas of ideology. A conformist is a person who knows the price of ideas and values, the price – in his experience – is small. In addition, this is a person who knows his place, but is always dissatisfied with it. Worldly wisdom places him outside ordinary morality and therefore above the rest. In his own imagination, a conformist is a potential titan, but his ambitions are rarely realized; they usually only give rise to resentment. Mikhalkov’s case is an exception. He truly became a powerful figure – an ideologist who knew the secret emptiness of ideas and was therefore able to masterfully juggle them – glorify the Communists and White Guards, populating their screen Russia with them – a magical land of daring foolishness.
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