From Russia, A Cinematic Double Take On WWII Era

Though Mikhalkov was not a member of the Communist Party, his family's status within the system enabled him to work in relative freedom, garnering an international reputation for such films as "Slave of Love" (1976), "An Unfinished Piece for a Player Piano" (1977) and "Oblomov" (1979).

Unlike many Soviet filmmakers, he successfully hurdled the fall of communism, emerging in the 1990s as a prominent Russian nationalist who railed against President Boris Yeltsin and advocated the restoration of the monarchy.

Today, Mikhalkov is a friend and unabashed admirer of Putin, who recently visited the set here. In Putin, he found his idealized Russian leader -- the strong hand who restored the country's pride and hews to a Russian identity apart from the West and is suspicious of foreign influence and intentions.

"We are living in a period when Russia is focusing itself," Mikhalkov said in his 2007 documentary celebrating Putin's 55th birthday. Pictures of the sermonizing Mikhalkov are intercut with adulatory images of Putin piloting a fighter jet, routing Chechen rebels and visiting factories to suggest an economy on the march.

"And all of these changes are in one way or another linked with his name," Mikhalkov intones in the film, leading one critic to compare it to a 1976 panegyric to former Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Last year, Mikhalkov and three other figures, claiming to speak for "the artistic community of Russia," signed an open letter in which they implored Putin to remain as president. The purring missive caused an uproar.

"A new cult of personality is being created," said Viktor Yerofeyev, a fiction writer who debated Mikhalkov at the time. "It reminds me of those sad times when it all began with congratulations and ended in blood."

But the director is unrepentant. "I think the idea of any change or playing heads or tails is baneful for our country," he said in response to Yerofeyev. "When a new power comes in the U.S., nothing changes except for the photograph of the wife on the president's desk. They do not replace the Stars and Stripes with a green or a red flag. But it is possible here, I'm afraid."

"Burnt by the Sun" ends with a written epilogue sparely describing the fates of some of its principal characters. Kotov, the sympathetic Bolshevik military hero who revered Stalin and the Soviet fatherland, was executed. His wife, Marusia, died in the network of labor camps known as the Gulag. Mitya, Marusia's former lover and the complex Judas in this Chekhovian drama, is shown back in Moscow in his apartment in the shadow of the Kremlin, his betrayal of Kotov complete. One of Stalin's secret policemen, he lies in a bath, his wrists cut and pumping blood.

All three will collide again in the new movie, Mikhalkov said.

"In those times, it happened quite often that people were informed their relatives were dead when, in fact, they weren't," Mikhalkov said. Resurrecting the dead, he noted playfully, is a well-worn fictional device: "Remember Sherlock Holmes was also killed."

Also returning in the sequel is Nadya, the daughter of Kotov and Marusia, who in the original was played by Mikhalkov's 6-year-old daughter in an acclaimed performance. Nadya has survived an orphanage for children of enemies of the people and is now a grown, beautiful woman on the front.

"She had to undergo so many ordeals during filming," said her admiring father. "In the nipping frost, she had to drag out the wounded men from the battlefield. And it has changed her inner understanding of the war."

In take after take here on a long sunny afternoon last week, Mikhalkov became the character Kotov. Astride a white horse, Kotov cuts through a crowd of Russians hurrying onto a train to escape the German advance in 1941. Among them is Marusia, now married to another man with whom she has had a child. Kotov watches her in silence and lets her go.

"Kotov is burnt from inside," Mikhalkov said. "In this episode, which we are shooting now, his wife is going away from him with another man. He has nothing left. As he says, nothing left except for a huge bunch of Germans."