Riveting: Dear Comrades! reviewed

Andrei Konchalovsky’s Dear Comrades! is based on a true event and set in 1962 in the Russian city of Novocherkassk where the local factory, the Novocherkassk Electric Locomotive Plant, went on strike. This doesn’t sound especially sexy, I know, but it is superbly acted and so rivetingly told my concentration did not waver for an instant which, given how hard it has been to concentrate lately, is high recommendation indeed. (It wouldn’t be fair to list the films I couldn’t concentrate on, as the problem is likely mine, but… Mank!)

Konchalovsky certainly has a wild CV. He has worked with Tarkovsky. He made the wonderfully hypnotic The Postman’s White Nights, about a remote Russian village whose only contact with the outside world is their postman. But there’s also his Nutcracker (in 3D), a crazed biopic of Michelangelo, and Tango & Cash, the American cop action comedy starring Sylvester Stallone. Still, good for him. He probably got a nice dacha out of Tango. (Or Cash.) But Dear Comrades! is nothing like any of the above and feels like what, as an auteur, he’s always been striving towards, although whether Stallone was integral to the process, I can’t say.

This is filmed in stark black and white, presumably to mimic the style of (heavily censored) Soviet films of that time. It immediately takes you back to that era, plus it is startlingly beautiful. At its centre is a spellbinding performance from Yuliya Vysotskaya as Lyuda, a committed party bureaucrat. She is head of sector for the town’s City Committee, and has a rebellious 18-year-old daughter (Yuliya Burova) and a limping old father (Sergei Erlish) who isn’t exactly a joy to be around. (‘Glad I’ll be dead soon…’). Lyuda is blonde and attractive but not soft or sentimental.