The Cannes Film Festival got off to an uneasy start last week with Nikita Mikhalkov’s saccharine three-hour melodrama The Barber Of Siberia, a movie with the epic qualities of a Russian winter. By the end of it, no peasant imagined the first shy blooms of springtime more fervently than we awaited the closing credits. Moreover, Mikhalkov himself had a stately cameo as Tsar Alexander III which, considering his own real-life political ambitions, was an act of hubris that had some of us muttering in the auditorium. Is there a Winter Palace we can storm?
The Barber Of Siberia stars Julia Ormond as Jane Callahan, a spirited American woman who undertakes a mammoth railway journey to 19th century Moscow to assist her eccentric engineer stepfather, played by Richard Harris with a straggly white beard and an unvarying (and presumably intentional) away-with-the-fairies facial expression. He has invented a bizarre new machine for cutting down trees, which will chop through the forests of Siberia as easily as a barber scythes through a beard.
To exploit this marvellous device, he needs state money and bureaucratic permission, and Julia’s task is to entrance and beguile a state commissioner, General Radlov, with her raunchy beauty.
But a tragic fate intervenes, and she falls passionately in love with one of Radlov’s cadets, Andrei Tolstoy. Their tempestuous affair, played out across the unforgiving Russian landmass and 180 unforgiving minutes of screen time, ends in disaster.
Our heroine is supposed to be a woman of chutzpah and style, an independent lady traveller with a doublet-and-hose swagger and a hint of something disreputable in her past. This persona is conveyed to us by Ormond with many a hearty laugh and toss of the head. Most unsubtly of all, she is insistently shown in the first half-hour or so smoking a cigarette in a holder, although this is a habit she mysteriously dispenses with as the movie continues and her love affair deepens. (I don’t think emotional crises have precisely this effect on smokers in the real world.)
Short of actually slapping her thigh, spitting a gob of baccy in the nearest spitoon with a clang, and doing an impression of Doris Day as Calamity Jane, Ormond could not do more to impress her feistiness on us. The problem is that Julia, with that delicately retrouss nose and fine, almost porcelain beauty, is not convincing in this role. Once she is in period costume, she looks like nothing so much as one of the china fairies or shepherdesses with a rainbow in her hand advertised inEa limited edition of 800 000 on theEback of the Sunday Mirror magazine.
And Oleg Menshikov, playing Andrei Tolstoy, the mercurial young cadet officer, just sucks. In fact, he more than sucks. He blows. Now puckish and spritely, now fiercely jealous of Julia’s honour in badinage with his fellow military students, now quivering all over with desire and emotional pain like a sensitive and impressionable racehorse, Tolstoy is very, very tiresome indeed. As they are having sex, with Julia masterfully astride this 20-year-old ingnue, she breathes: “My beautiful boy … ” Excuse me? Beautiful? He looks like Roddy McDowall in Planet of the Apes.
Both Ormond and Menshikov are let down by a terrible script, which uneasily switches between English and Russian with a little French, and the whole thing suffers from being a Russian film with American hormones injected – a dire transgenic experiment.
The heavy-handed comic setpieces expose this picture’s uncertain idiom most clearly: an over-waxed ballroom floor that causes the dancers to slip over, a whoopee cushion for the cadets’ history instructor, and General Radlov getting drunk on vodka – having been persuaded against his will to take a drink by the mischievous Ormond, who punches the air and says “Yesssss!” disconcertingly like a 1990s Camden Girl.
That the man responsible for 1995’s Oscar- winning Burnt by the Sun can have contrived this silly and lumbering film is unfortunate. The story is told in yearning flashback, with Ormond now a much older woman, and this signals that Mikhalkov wanted to make a sort of Russian Titanic, and so hit Hollywood paydirt.
Mikhalkov claimed that more people had queued to see his film in Moscow in a month than had gone to see Titanic. He said he wanted his epic to show that his was not “a country of criminals and prostitutes”. Rather, the story showed “Russia as it should be – strong enough to stand alone, wise enough not to use its strength against weaker peoples”.
But there is only one way inEwhich Mikhalkov’s film resembles James Cameron’s sleek, all-conquering blockbuster. That sinking feeling …