Context (Moscow Times)
September 21-27, 2007
Laying Down the Law
In his new film, "12," Nikita Mikhalkov takes inspiration from a classic Hollywood drama but uses the format to discuss the burning issue of the Chechen conflict.
By Alastair Gee
Except for a few scenes, Sidney Lumet's celebrated 1957 film "12 Angry Men" takes place entirely in a cramped, stuffy jury room. Twelve sweating jurors debate whether to send a teenager to the electric chair for stabbing his father. Eleven vote yes. One, played by a serene Henry Fonda, disagrees. Lumet's focus isn't on the accused, the victim or where they come from -- he concentrates on the jurors as doubt creeps over them.
That's not the case in the 2007 remake by internationally renowned Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov, who last week won a Special Lion award for Overall Work at the Venice International Film Festival. His film switches back and forth between the jury room and war-torn Chechnya, the accused's home, to visceral and devastating effect. Mikhalkov's film is not just a Russian-accented copy, but a movie that also drives home the terrible brutality of the Chechen wars.
In this new version, a Chechen boy is taken to Moscow by a soldier -- a family friend -- after his parents are killed during the murderous conflict between Russia and Chechen separatists in the 1990s. The soldier is stabbed in his apartment, while a neighbor hears someone cry, "I'll kill you!" and says he saw the boy running away.
Images of a hellish, muddy Grozny, the Chechen capital, intersperse the jury's deliberations. Contorted dead bodies litter streets that run between ruined buildings. In one scene, the boy implores his Chechen-speaking mother to use Russian. Later, she is shown with a bullet in her head, her husband knifed in the back, their home set on fire.
Like a mantra, one shot is repeated over and over. A dog runs down a rain-streaked road carrying an unidentifiable object in its mouth. Mikhalkov finally, awfully, reveals what it is at the end of the film.
Mikhalkov, whose "Burnt By the Sun" won the 1994 Oscar for Best Foreign Film, explained that his movie is a criticism of former President Boris Yeltsin's readiness to wage war in Chechnya -- and drew parallels with U.S. President George W. Bush's war in Iraq.
"I think that it was a tragic mistake. It was based on incompetence, on a lack of culture, on the idea that in two days, the war would be over," he said at a recent news conference.
"They had no understanding of where they'd ended up, that it was a completely different situation. It's a mistake on the same level that the world is today making in Iraq."
Mikhalkov comes from a distinguished family. He is the younger brother of director Andrei Konchalovsky, known for Hollywood movies, including "Tango and Cash." His father, children's author Sergei Mikhalkov, wrote the words of the Soviet national anthem and the new Russian one. Mikhalkov makes much of his aristocratic roots; he is descended from the Golitsyns, a family of Russian nobles.
While still at school, Mikhalkov began acting in movies, including the 1963 "I Walk Around Moscow," famous for a relaxed style typical of Khrushchev's thaw, and his brother's 1969 dramatization of Ivan Turgenev's "A Nest of Gentry."
He attended Moscow's prestigious VGIK film school, and in 1974 directed and starred in his first feature, a Red Western titled "At Home Among Strangers, Stranger at Home." Mikhalkov increasingly gained an international reputation, and his 1976 "A Slave of Love," which follows a film crew as they try to make a silent movie in a resort town as the Revolution rages around them, won acclaim in the United States. Konchalovsky's five-hour epic "Sibiriade," with Mikhalkov in the main role, received a Special Grand Jury Prize at Cannes.
After directing a clutch of notable films, Mikhalkov returned to acting in the 1980s. He played Henry Baskerville in the television drama "The Hound of the Baskervilles," capitalizing on the Soviet craze for the Sherlock Holmes stories.
For directing 1992's "Urga," also known as "Close to Eden" and set in a yurt in Inner Mongolia, he received the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. His most famous movie is "Burnt by the Sun," starring Mikhalkov himself as a colonel decorated for his role in the 1917 revolution who becomes caught up in Stalin's 1937 purges.
Buoyed by the picture's success, Mikhalkov went on to make his biggest-budget film, 1998's $45 million "The Barber of Siberia." It starred Julia Ormond and Oleg Menshikov as lovers in Moscow in the 1880s, and takes it name from an experimental tree-cutting machine that a character has created. But despite its lavish costumes and scenes, including dancing bears and duels, its reception was mixed, with many critics calling the three-hour movie rambling.
After a nine-year break from directing, Mikhalkov is currently filming "Burnt by the Sun 2," due to be released in early 2008. "12" was shot in two months during a break in filming.
"It's not a remake," Mikhalkov argued in Time Out. "That film is about the triumph of American law and about the importance of finding truth in the most complicated life circumstances. Our picture is about how a Russian person can't live according to the law."
While the fashion-oriented film "Gloss," made recently by Mikhalkov's brother, seemed to be portraying the high-rolling Russia of the 1990s, "12" is more of the moment. The jury's deliberations take place in a school gymnasium, eerily evoking the gym in which 334 civilians died during the Beslan hostage crisis in September 2004.
The 12 jurors are mostly identifiable Russian types, including a wealthy New Russian, a poisonous nationalist and an elderly Jewish member of the intelligentsia. They gradually reveal the decisive parts of their histories that lead them to act, and vote on the accused, in the way they do. Sergei Garmash, as the racist, tells of his disorientation in modern-day Moscow, with its Bentleys and hosts of immigrants.
Though the film is an hour longer than "12 Angry Men" and at times seems in danger of dragging, Mikhalkov livens the narrative with rich cinematography and sound effects absent in its black-and-white predecessor. The cavernous jury room is flooded with intense crimson light as the sun sets, and thick shadows later lengthen across it. Trains and pipes softly clink in the background, and, after a bird flies in, heavy silences are punctured by the atmospheric whirr of its wings.
Critics have, on the whole, responded positively to the film.
"The picture aspires to be an encyclopedia of Russian life, and that is indeed what it is," said the Time Out reviewer. "This cinema is funny as well as tragic, great and disgusting, just like reality, which it describes in detail."
But the Kommersant business daily added that the scenes in Chechnya seem random and lightweight in comparison with the fleshed-out characterization of the jurors.
Mikhalkov hopes the film will become a talking point.
"This picture came out of our life, and I'd like it to return to our life," he said at the news conference.
"I think this film is important for the whole country. Maybe I'm mistaken."
"12" is playing at cinemas citywide.