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| Courtesy of Mosfilm |
Before making cinema history with his
1985 Cannon Film production of Runaway Train which garnered three Oscar
nominations for the company, Russian master filmmaker Andrei Konchalovsky came
very close to taking home the top prize at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival with
his gargantuan epic film Siberiade.
A film which ultimately lost to Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now
but nevertheless took home the Grand Prix, sparked up a friendship with Coppola
who remarked he’d be happy to share the Palme d’Or with him and soon landed
Konchalovsky a successful if not brief transition to Hollywood, Siberiade is
known as the film that helped secure that transition.
And yet few worldly cinephiles have
actually attempted its extravagant running time, a bona fide shame that this
decades-spanning saga remains largely unseen as it is positively the most
terrifying and deeply moving oil drilling film since There Will Be Blood. Initially planned in 1974 when the chairman
of the USSR Goskino approached Konchalovsky with the idea of making a film
about oil workers for the Communist Party of the Soviet Union before the writer-director
with Valentin Yezhov began populating their saga with characters that took
precedence over the setting, Siberiade evolved into a four-part saga amassing
four hours spanning nearly sixty years of Russian history.
Beginning at the height of the
Bolshevik Revolution before segueing into WWI and WWII unto the present, the
film depicts two feuding family dynasties: the working class Ustyuzhanins and
the wealthy Solomins. Tracking the sworn
mortal enemies feuding from the early 1900s and onward through their various
alliances and conflicts, the film is at once a multi-generational ensemble
character driven saga as well as a portrait of the evolution of the Russian
people in microcosm.
Divided into separate sections all
stemming from a miniscule village in Siberia with recurring leitmotifs of
characters running from the front door down the hill to the outside world, after
we start out freezing to near death on the icy taiga before boiling down to a
tense and mythically frightening oil action-adventure film, Siberiade could
be taken at face value as Russia’s very own Gone with the Wind. Though the film moves throughout the country,
each chapter reverts back to this particular village where all the discord seems
to generate with a mini-montage of Russian historical footage cementing the
passage of time.
All of this massive saga stems from the
fact that government ordained industrialization threatens the village which
also happens to be sitting on an ocean of oil replete with a scary fire swamp protected
by mercurial spirits. To make matters
worse, an old cemetery is all that stands between the people and the bigwigs
trying to get their hands on the oil reserves.
As the battle between the rich and impoverished intensifies,
longstanding familial quarrels running decades deep begin to manifest
themselves again.
Starring a massive ensemble cast
including director/actor Nikita Mikhalkov, Natalya Andrejchenko, Vitali Solomin
(playing an Ustyuzhanin incidentally), and Sergey Shakurov and at one point Dersu Uzala actor Maxim Munzuk, Siberiade is sprawling mammoth filmmaking
spoken of the same breath as Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 only with far
more emotionally connective tissue. Most
of the film is carried by Mikhalkov who winds up taking over the last two
halves of the film which tracks his journey from poor Ustyuzhanin son to dandy
oil man who brings to the character a certain swagger that’s somewhat obnoxious
but nevertheless entertaining. But that doesn’t
mean there’s ample room for redemption as the formulation of his drilling plant
grows more dangerous than it seems.
Gorgeously shot in 1.33:1 by Levan
Paatashvili, the scope of Konchalovsky’s staggering vision shifting freely
between color and sepia-toned black-and-white comes onscreen much like his Runaway
Train with a violent natural force we ourselves struggle to latch
onto. Capturing the deep snowy
mountaintops of Siberia in between the swampy mucky village and labyrinthine
forests and the rugged terrain of the wartime battlefields, Siberiade feels
like another universe entirely different from the world we think we know and
live in. No doubt the earthiest Russian film
since Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev or Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala which
also took its 65mm cameras into the frozen Siberian region.
The feel of Siberiade would not
be what it is without the generous musical contribution of legendary composer
Eduard Artemyev of Solaris and Stalker fame. A progressive rock score replete with
guitars, electronic keyboards and percussion, the score for Siberiade which
might be my favorite Artemyev work yet sounds very like Pink Floyd’s Wish
You Were Here. Starting out soft and
quiet before exploding with electronic melodies and electric guitar strumming,
Artemyev’s score lets you know right away Konchalovsky’s film means
business. Powerful, evocative, emotional
and sometimes downright scary, the score becomes the emotional core of the saga. One of the strongest examples is a recurring central
musical theme which finds itself being reworked different in each evolving
storyline chapter, becoming more expressive musically as the film goes on.
There’s also, as previously mentioned,
some scenery involving a fire swamp bubbling with gasoline waiting to be
ignited and an oil well explosion where Artemyev’s score and the film’s visual palette
seem to stand up and make full throated screams. So frightening are these scenes they chill
deeper to the bone than most conventional horror films, informing the stark
terror felt by witnessing a fireball spewing forth from an oil well explosion
in Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood. These elements combined suggest the idea of
Siberia as fertile ground whose dangerous ingredients lay in wait to be harnessed
by human ingenuity and engineering, if it doesn’t kill you while you try. Probably one of the only other oil films in
the world to completely understand that distinctive fear and awe.
Despite copping the Grand Prix and
landing Konchalovsky a film directing career in America, Siberiade still
tends to fly under the radar of most world cinephiles interested in
international filmmaking. Nevertheless
it became a huge hit in Russia and years later the main theme from the
soundtrack was played during the opening ceremony of the 2014 Winter Olympics
in Sochi. Seen now, from wherever you
are in the world it is hard not to get caught up in the struggles, failures and
successes of the Ustyuzhanins and the Solomins.
While sprawling in size and scope, when you boil it down Siberiade could
be taken as another spin on the classic eternal warring between the Montagues
and the Capulets with few examples of the two families meeting in the middle.
One of the few films that’s most
representative of the Russian spirit as seen through the lives of individuals
trying to make lives for themselves in the Siberian region, Konchalovsky’s towering
masterpiece though initially intended exclusively for Russian audiences winds
up evolving into an emotionally involving and relatable saga about ordinary
people trying to harness the near untamable power of the earth. Long but never boring and at times frankly
nerve wracking, Siberiade is one of the finest examples of Russian
cinema few people talk about anymore and arguably the pinnacle of the legendary
Andrei Konchalovsky’s still active and illustrious career.
--Andrew Kotwicki
