Dear Comrades!

Dir: Andrei Konchalovsky (2hrs) (15)

★★★★

The massacre of around 80 unarmed protesters in the Russian city of Novocherkassk in 1962 – an atrocity kept secret for 30 years – is the subject of this riveting drama from veteran director Andrei Konchalovsky, said Kevin Maher in The Times. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival, it strikes a “wry”, satirical note at first, with “droll one liners about Soviet ineptitude” as workers at the city’s power plant go on strike over rising food prices. The subsequent massacre, however, is depicted “unsparingly”. The film’s protagonist, local Communist Party member Lyuda Syomina (Julia Vysotskaya), has a reputation for endorsing this kind of crackdown. But when her teenage daughter, Svetka – a worker at the plant – goes missing, she is torn between her loyalty to the party, and her personal anguish.

Shot in black and white, the film is “disturbingly handsome”, said Mark Kermode in The Observer; as the chaos mounts, the “eerie stillness” of its cinematography strikes a “horribly threatening chord”. Yet for a chilly film, it has “unexpected warmth”, largely thanks to Vysotskaya, who perfectly captures Lyuda’s dreams and her disillusion. Konchalovsky shows the “incompetence, paranoia, bureaucracy and secrecy” that led to this mass murder, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Afterwards, officialdom “blandly” declares there will be a party with dancing at 7pm, apparently to “expunge any ill feeling”. Bloodstained asphalt is covered with a clean new layer. As the film’s ending adds another level of “bleak irony”, it offers a powerful conclusion to a “passionate drama of fear and rage”. Available on Curzon Home Cinema.