From Russia, A Cinematic Double Take On WWII Era

VOISKOVITSY, Russia -- In the 1994 Russian film "Burnt by the Sun," the idyllic life of a family at their country home outside Moscow is smashed on a single day by Stalinism. Fans of the movie, which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, are likely to be startled by a coming sequel. And not only because director Nikita Mikhalkov has reanimated characters who appeared to die in the original.

The first film, an intimate drama that shimmered with dread, played out almost entirely on a small set. The new movie, part of which is being filmed at this rural railway junction about 30 miles south of St. Petersburg, is a panoramic blockbuster with battle scenes straight out of Hollywood. With a budget of $55 million, it is the most expensive movie in Russian history.

In the sequel, the four main characters from the first movie, three of whom were thought to be dead, hurtle unawares toward each other in the furnace of World War II. And Joseph Stalin, hovering unseen like a malign spirit in the first film, steps onto this stage as a speaking character.

And what a stage. Mikhalkov, 62, is not making one movie but two full-length films, "Burnt by the Sun 2," Parts 1 and 2, plus a 12-part television series that will track and expand on the material in the two movies. Mikhalkov plans to release the first part of the film version May 9, 2010, the 65th anniversary of victory in World War II. The movie's second part is to be released several months later, with the television version following in 2011 or 2012.

"It's an epic in the tradition of war films," said Kirill Razlogov, a leading film scholar and critic in Moscow. "And if the film is a success, I don't think people will care that it's completely different in scope than the original."

The memorialization of World War II, which Russians call the Great Patriotic War, has become an almost state-sanctified event increasingly coated in a neo-Soviet historical orthodoxy.

New high school textbooks soft-pedal Stalin's murderous brutality such as the purges that nearly crippled the military in advance of the war. The claims of neighboring Baltic countries that they were occupied, not liberated, by the Red Army are greeted with official fury.

And at a World War II conference last month, which was sponsored by the FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB, there were calls for the Russian parliament to overturn a 1989 condemnation of the 1939 secret protocol between Stalin and Adolf Hitler that carved up Poland and awarded the then-independent Baltic states to the Soviet Union.

In an interview last week on the set, Mikhalkov said he wants to capture the "sacred" quality of fighting on one's own soil for the survival of the country.

But he said that "Burnt by the Sun 2" is not an ideologically driven film and that it presents a harsh portrait of Stalin, whom Mikhalkov called the "great Satan." He showed a reporter an early cut from the film in which one character, Col. Sergei Petrovich Kotov, played by Mikhalkov himself, dreams of killing Stalin by suffocating him in a cake with the dictator's portrait carved in the icing.

"For me, there is only simple criteria: whether it is exciting or not, whether the audience sympathizes with the characters or not," Mikhalkov said. "This criteria is much more effective than any ideology."

The director was born into a privileged Soviet family. His father, Sergei, a poet and writer of children's stories, won the Stalin Prize for literature, headed the Soviet Writers' Union and wrote the lyrics to the Soviet national anthem. (When then-President Vladimir Putin restored the music of the Soviet anthem, Mikhalkov Sr. reworked the lyrics.) Nikita Mikhalkov's older brother, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, is also a film director who has worked in Hollywood and directed such fare as "Tango & Cash" with Sylvester Stallone.