Say You Want a 'Revolution'

In a clever old vaudeville skit, a Bolshevik firebrand would preach from his soapbox to a handful of poor bystanders. "Comes the Revolution, comrades, everybody’s gonna eat strawberries ’n’ cream!" A timid old man would protest, "But I don’t like strawberries ’n’ cream." The Bolshevik would growl menacingly, "Comes the revolution, comrade, you’ll EAT strawberries ’n’ cream!" It was a subtle, pre-Cold War acknowledgement that the workers’ paradise was really a gray, murderous, hellish place.

In "Children of the Revolution," a razor-sharp, often hilarious, political satire from Australia, Judy Davis is an unrepentant Communist who refuses to stop, sniff and admit that the strawberries ’n’ cream have gone sour. Using a cockeyed, surreal style harking back to Monty Python-ism, writer- director Peter Duncan illuminates the tragedy of all true believers whose faith depends upon keeping ears and eyes firmly shut. Don’t let anyone tell you that "Children of the Revolution" is outdated just because the Soviet Union is kaputsky.

"Children of the Revolution" is a pseudo- documentary, exploring the roots of a fictional crisis which supposedly brought Australia to the brink of civil war in 1990. The primary instigator, it seems, was a megalomaniac right-wing union organizer named Joe Welch (Richard Roxburgh). From his prison cell, Welch blames it all on his red menace of a mom.

In flashback, we meet Joan (Davis) as a Communist student activist in 1951. Humorless and clenched, she’s so enamored of Stalin that she writes him daily. When his aides give the bored, aging dictator (F. Murray Abraham) a pile of Joan’s "Dear Comrade Leader" letters for his amusement, he’s so taken with her fervor -- and with her photo -- that he invites her to Moscow.

Leaving her affection-starved boyfriend, Welch (Geoffrey Rush) behind, Joan is Kremlin-bound. There’s a champagne-and-vodka-soaked dinner during which Stalin and his pals Beria (Paul Livingston), Khruschev (Dennis Watkins) and Malenkov (Stephen Abbott) entertain her with a bizarre rendition of "I Get a Kick Out of You." After which, Stalin beds his young acolyte and promptly dies. How embarrassing.

"You killed Stalin?" KGB/Australian double agent David (Sam Neill) asks Joan with a delight that shocks her through her tears. David’s in love with her. In fact, for a woman who is, by her own admission, "no fun," Joan has dictators, spies, aparatchiks and even regular guys falling all over her. Back home, Joan learns that she’s pregnant, though not necessarily by you-know-who. What follows is a mad take on the nature-versus-nurture debate, as we watch son Joe (Ben McIvor as a child, Roxburgh as an adult), despite his mom’s efforts, develop disturbingly fascistic tendencies, and a kinky yen for jail cells and handcuffs. Davis specializes in driven women, and her Joan is a pip among a fine cast, all of whom tune right into director Duncan’s wacky wavelength. Fearlessly, Davis plays a pain in the neck and makes her droll, infuriating and sad.

Lurching toward its blackly funny conclusion, "Children of the Revolution" gets caught up in a few too many improbabilities. But how cleverly Duncan juggles his political pins! From Soviet Communism, to right-wing Red-baiting, all sides of the Cold War get skewered. And the movie looks good in both its ’50s flashbacks, its ’90s chaos and its fake newsreel footage. The scenes in Duncan’s imaginary Kremlin look a bit like Franco’s tomb -- fascistic. And why not? Authoritarian is as authoritarian does, comrade.

CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION (R) — Contains sexual situations and innuendo, nudity and profanity, muted violence.