|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Films to the French Taste
| Article
# : |
19948 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1992 |
1,976 Words |
| Author
: |
Cynthia Grenier
Cynthia Grenier is contributing editor to the Arts section of
The World & I. |
The link between two recent films--Urga, a Franco-Russian coproduction, and Van Gogh, a uniquely French production--may at best be problematic. But there can be no doubt as to the considerable popularity both works have enjoyed with the French moviegoing public during the last few months.
In its first few months of release, the French film--three hours' worth devoted to the final months of the celebrated Dutch artist's life--ran second to the No. 1 blockbuster in France, Terminator 2 (Yes, French audiences are proving to be as susceptible to Arnold Schwarzenegger in cyborg mode as Americans). Urga may not have racked up quite as impressive a record at the box office, but it did play for many months in theaters around Paris, which is something of a feat when you consider that its star is a non-professional Mongolian actor by the name of Bayaertu.
Admittedly Urga had won the top prize--the coveted Golden Lion--at last fall's Venice film Festival, beating out The Fisher King, Prospero's Book, and other films with internationally known starts. This award usually guarantees a significant measure of popular success in France. Its director, Nikita Mikhalkov, is one of the former Soviet Union's most accomplished directors. He has been particularly successful in re-creating earlier--non-Soviet--periods of Russian life in his films. A common ruse used for decades, employed by most of the talented directors of the former Soviet empire to evade the strictures of state censorship, was either to film Russian literary classics or to situate stories in prerevolutionary times.
Mikhalkov's film Oblomov, based on Ivan Goncharov's celebrated nineteenth-century novel, is deemed his finest work. Indeed, he so vividly evoked Russia of the last century that Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, on seeing the film was moved to return to her native land in 1986, although she did not stay there for long. Two other Mikhalkov films that found critical and commercial success in the West were Slave of Love (about a movie company on location in 1917) and Dark Eyes, based on a Chekhov short story, starring Marcello Mastroianni, who won the Best Actor award for that performance at the Cannes Film Festival in 1987.
Interestingly enough, Mikhalkov has a brother who is also a film director, but he made his career in Hollywood. Andrei Konchalovsky, who uses their mother's maiden name (not wanting to bear the name of his elder brother in the same profession), went to Los Angeles in the seventies and made such critically acclaimed films as Runaway Train and the
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
