We value Andrei Konchalovsky’s patience with people whose beliefs are hard to share. His screenplays take an artist’s doubts or a loyalist’s stubbornness seriously, though he can let a speech go on long after its point is clear.
Fi1m perspective
In Dear Comrades (2020), officials seem more disturbed by disagreement than by the reasons workers are protesting. Andrei Konchalovsky and co-writer Elena Kiseleva find humour in that certainty before allowing it to become frightening. Lyuda, played by Yuliya Vysotskaya, remains devoted to the authorities, and the writing asks us to take her loyalty seriously. We do not have to agree with her to find her worth watching. Konchalovsky earns our attention by making sympathy difficult, rather than supplying a sympathetic guide to the events.
That willingness to leave a character struggling is already there in Andrei Rublev (1966), co-written with its director, Andrei Tarkovsky. The screenplay takes the artist’s doubts about continuing to work seriously, without treating the people around him as assistants to his talent. We admire how little interest the writers have in explaining a talent through a few useful experiences. Some of the film’s symbolism is obscure, but the question of how Rublev keeps working remains worth our patience. The writing deserves its share of the credit alongside Anatoly Solonitsyn’s humanity and Vadim Yusov’s forceful images.
His directing career makes a less tidy progression. Siberiade (1979) was followed by American work including the thriller Runaway Train (1985) and the action film Tango & Cash (1989). Later Russian work includes The Postman's White Nights (2014), an intimate drama he both wrote and directed. These changes of scale and genre make it unhelpful to expect every film to look or behave alike. For us, the more useful connection is his interest in people finding their convictions difficult to live by.
In Dear Comrades, that interest is served by his controlled direction as well as the shared screenplay. We were horrified by the calm presentation of violence against the workers: the unhurried direction makes us look at what is being done. Yet some officials’ speeches continue after their point is clear, and the later drama becomes less sharply organised. Vysotskaya supplies the uncertainty that those speeches lack, giving us good reason to stay with a film whose writing occasionally lets her down. Start there for Konchalovsky as writer and director, with some patience for dialogue that could have stopped sooner.
Biography
Andrei Konchalovsky is a Russian film and theatre director, screenwriter and producer. Born Andrei Sergeyevich Mikhalkov on 20 August 1937 in Moscow, he is the son of writer Sergey Mikhalkov and brother of filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov. He studied piano for ten years at the Moscow Conservatory before training at VGIK, where he met Andrei Tarkovsky.
Early in his career he collaborated with Tarkovsky on the screenplays for Ivan's Childhood (1962) and Andrei Rublev (1966). His directorial debut was The First Teacher (1965). Later Soviet films include Uncle Vanya (1970) and the epic Siberiade (1979). In the 1980s he worked in the United States, directing Runaway Train (1985) and Tango & Cash (1989) among others, before returning to Russia. Recent work includes Dear Comrades! (2020).
