Burnt By the Sun 2: Citadel – Edward Artemyev (2011, 320)

(http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/51/uvny.jpg/)

Tracklist:

01. Heat
02. In attack
03. And soared
04. Murder scene
05. Law and order
06. Summer
07. December 7
08. Gladiators of the new world
09. In the trenches
10. Crucifixion scene
11. Melancholia
12. Mountains of Madness

Link

https://mega.co.nz/#!ldVAgIpY!NRU72Xz7rFNyvYnEGDEDLFDqIGdiEJj8aoPaQmG NGS0

———- Post added at 10:33 PM ———- Previous post was at 10:33 PM ———-

In the opening of Burnt by the Sun 2: Citadel, the camera glides from the mosquito’s point of view, from the microcosm of plants and insects to trenches full of men—Russian soldiers. By chance, the mosquito saves a soldier’s life. Toward the end of the film, when the protagonist, Sergei Kotov, and a band of unarmed civilian draft dodgers storm the eponymous Citadel, an insect saves the day again: a spider comes into focus through a sniper rifle lens and distracts a German soldier, starting a chain of events that leads to a fatal explosion. Such deus ex machina denouements drive Citadel’s narrative. What initially seems like a series of jumbled, unconnected scenes all conspire to fulfill Kotov’s quest to reunite with his daughter, now a nurse somewhere on the front lines, and his need to prevail against his enemies. Since Citadel’s celebrated and reviled director Nikita Mikhalkov is also playing Kotov, any evaluation of the film can’t help but become embroiled with Mikhalkov’s own public battles with his colleagues, audiences, and critics.

The original Burnt by the Sun cogently depicted Soviet happiness destroyed. When Mitia Arsent’ev (Oleg Men’shikov) arrested KomDiv (Division Commander) Sergei Kotov (Nikita Mikhalkov) and destroyed his sunny, rural, domestic life, we, the audience, realized that Kotov’s happiness with his wife and daughter had been illusory: it had rested on the moral compromises of the recent bloody revolutionary war and on willful blindness to ongoing arrests and torture of the Stalinist 1930s. Burnt by the Sun earned the Grand Prix at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Burnt by the Sun 2, set during the Great Patriotic War, destroys the finality of that original tale: it resurrects Kotov and Mitia, compresses time—Kotov’s daughter Nadia (Nadezhda Mikhalkova) grows up way too fast—and invents new personalities and lives for the main characters. While watching the film, one cannot help but think that this narrative violence has only one purpose: to ensure Kotov’s revenge on Mitia, Stalin, and Soviet society at large.