Analysis Of “Burnt By The Sun’ Essay, Analysis Of “Burnt By The Sun’ Analysis of Burnt by the Sun Professor William Comer SLAV 14 Jay S. Kerr 610966 September 28, 1998 Analysis of Burnt by the Sun by Nikita Mikhalkov The movie Burnt by the Sun by Nikita Mikhalkov, is a film dedicated to everyone who was burnt by the sun of the (Russian) Revolution. Stalin consolidated his power in the mid-1930 s, by launching a campaign of political terror. His purges, arrests, and deportations to labor camps touched almost every family. The government under Stalin intruded upon and manipulated the private life of the people. The director, Nikita Mikhalkov, uses a well-off Russian family reunion at a summer home as a tool to portray the tragedy of Stalin s policies.
The movie presents the relationship between public and private life by dividing the military and secret police against the family. Interestingly enough the characters of the movie feel a certain duty to serve their government and motherland even when they know it will tear their family apart. The director displays a sample of public life intruding on private lives early in the movie. A caravan of tanks, trucks, and soldiers roll through the countryside over peasants’ wheat fields until a colonel of the Red Army is called upon to help. Sergei Petrovich Kotov, a hero of the Revolution, is spending the morning in the sauna with his young wife Maryusa and six-year old daughter Nadia, when he is called upon to stop the war games. Sergei expressed a reluctance to leave the intimacy of the sauna to contend with a public matter, symbolic of his love for family or private life.
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Kotov, then, urges the soldiers to go elsewhere. Had the soldiers proceeded they would have destroyed the wheat field and damaged the livelihood of its farmers. Although at first Kotov seemed reluctant to help, his playful gestures while persuading the soldiers displayed that he was truly admired, respected, and that he enjoyed serving his people. The film does a great job of introducing Kotov as a man of simplicity whose only duty is to serve the people and his family similar to the way in which Stalin thought he was. Kotov s natural ability to resolve public issues seemed to hint that future intrusions into his life would occur knowing Stalin envied, yet felt threatened by men of stature. Next, Mikhalkov places the antagonist Mitya amongst Kotov s family into their idyllic summer home to display a sense of duty the characters held.
Mitya and Sergei talk, both advocating their duty to the motherland without prejudice towards the end of the movie. Toward the end of the movie Mitya creates a fairy tale to explain why he left not only his friends and family, but also his lover Maryusa. He was requested to join the NKVD and so he did out of duty to protect his lover even though he would have probably been killed had he not. A man in love with a woman would not just leave without a reason. He fled Russia to France, leaving Maryusa clueless to his whereabouts. In conversation with Maryusa, Sergei divulges that had he been in a similar position he would have left because of his overwhelming love for his motherland not out of fear.
The characters obviously felt it their duty to protect their loved ones and their country. Kotov knows that Mitya works for the NKVD but worries only that this intelligent, admirable man, his wife s old lover, may stir up lost emotions. However, Mitya has not traveled to the family just to visit; he has a mission. Mitya s life too has been again affected by public life. Mitya doesn t mention to Nadia in his fairy tale that he had agreed to perform a task. Mitya s job was to remove Sergei quietly from his comfortable family life, without anyone noticing, and accompany him to prison, torture, death.
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The director skillfully presents this without us knowing any sooner than Sergei did. In an interview the director states, In the film, Sergei Petrovich Kotov, the Red Army colonel and hero of the revolution, does not exude the image of one who could be accused of treason. When Stalin s political police force, the NKVD, comes to arrest him, Sergei remains very calm, expecting to resolve everything with a simple phone call to the Kremlin. But when the arresting officers turn violent, Sergei understands. This is not the tragedy of a guilty man, but the tragedy of a man blinded by the sun. One would believe Mikhalkov wanted the film as a whole to chill us with the suddenness of evil that Stalin and his loyal patrons could administer.
The film struck up a sense of how far reaching Stalin s grasp was. The truck lost on the road seemed to be another example of swift evil. Throughout the movie a man searches for a place asking bystanders if they know of the place. Unfortunately the driver s wife washes his shirt with the name of he and his trucks destination.
The situation provides comic relief throughout the movie. Then at the end the man happens to be in the wrong place, at the wrong time, crossing paths with the secret police escorting Kotov. The agents in the car can not allow the man to repeat what he has seen. Their paranoia forces them to execute him. This type of fear created by the secret police became synonymous with Stalinism.
The film gives an understanding of the reactionary aims of Stalin and his patriots purges, but even more importantly to life in Russia. Mikhalkov wants us to see life s ups and downs. He states, … I am only trying to show through a tragic perspective, the charm of a simple existence: of children continuing to be born, of people loving each other, living their life s moments, and having faith that all that was happening around them was for the best. At this time, a man could say to his wife, Give thanks to Comrade Stalin for the love I have for you. If he didn t exist, we would never have met! Life does not discriminate anymore than the revolution.
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Kotov is executed for no apparent reason other than he stood out. If Stalin s patriots had discriminated, they would have found a man done with politics, and too caught up in love of ordinary life with his family to do anything to disrupt Stalin s power Bibliography An Interview With Nikita Mikhalkov. 20 para. Online. web Nov. 11, 98..
