Review of Dear Comrades! (2020) by Netflic — 28 Jan 2021

This movie is an official entry into Oscar 2020 from Russia.

The director is quite famous: Andrei Konchalovsky.

The movie is based on historic events. In 1962 there was a strike at an industrial plant in the Russian city of Novocherkassk.

The authorities ruthlessly squashed it and then tried very hard that no one, neither abroad nor inside the country knew anything about it.

People not intimately familiar with totalitarian regimes would have hard time to understand how it is possible. Well, it is, it was and it will be in a country like the USSR.

 I lived in that country, and I got to know about these events well after the Soviet Union collapsed.

But back to the movie. The conflict is shown through the eyes of a woman, a typical "apparatchik", a functionary who has an unwavering belief in the righteousness of the Party and the cause of building communism.

Then she becomes a witness to mass casualties among peaceful demonstrators at the hands of KGB and the Army. When her daughter becomes missing for several days, that unshakable belief of hers seems to be shattered. Or does it?

The movie is done quite professionally, one could feel the hand of a master.

But it failed to impress me the way previous Russian Oscar entries did ("Beanpole" 2019, "Loveless", 2017, "Leviathan" 2014).

Maybe my expectations were too high. Or maybe it was a totally different level of movie making.