A SLAVE OF LOVE Movie Review

The enchanting directorial debut from Soviet director Nikita Mikhalkov (Oblomov, Dark Eyes) is the story of a film crew trying to complete a project they're shooting in the Crimea in 1917, even as the revolution erupts all around them. A Slave of Love is a romantic and poignant love story on a number of levels, including the director's nostalgic longing for a time long past. The female star of the film-within-a-film (Elena Solovei) learns all-too-well the reason for the revolution (which she at first finds merely an annoyance), and her heartbreak at the loss of what seems a simpler, gentler era is finally tempered by a stiff dose of reality and replaced by her optimism for a better world in the future. One of the most sophisticated Soviet films of the 1970s, it marked the beginning of Mikhalkov's intriguing career—one which would be marked by both disillusionment and a vastly refined point of view by the era of the 1990s.

NEXT STOP … Burnt by the Sun, Before the Revolution, Anna

1978 94m/C RU Elena Solovei, Rodion Nakhapetov, Alexander Kalyagin; D: Nikita Mikhalkov; M: Eduard Artemyev. VHS COL, AUD