ANNA
A film review by James Berardinelli
Copyright 1997 James Berardinelli
RATING (0 TO 10): 8.5 Alternative Scale: ***1/2 out of ****
Russia/France, 1993 U.S. Release Date: widely variable (1996-97) Running Length: 1:39 MPAA Classification: No MPAA Rating (Mature themes) Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Featuring: Anna Mikhalkov, Nikita Mikhalkov, Nadia Mikhalkov Director: Nikita Mikhalkov Written by: Nikita Mikhalkov with the assistance of Serguei Mirochnitchenko Cinematography: Vadim Alisov, Elizbar Karavayev, Pavel Lebeshev, Vadim Yusov Music: Edward Artemyev U.S. Distributor: New Yorker Films In Russian with subtitles
If someone asked you a series of questions today, would you give the same answers you might have given a year ago? Five years ago? Ten years ago? This apparently simple premise provides the spine for Russian director Nikita Mikhalkov's surprisingly powerful and affecting documentary, ANNA. Completed in 1993, the film, which is distributed in North America by tiny New Yorker Films, is only now making its slow way from coast to coast, playing in festivals and at special events. It's worth searching out.
Mikhalkov sat down with his daughter, Anna, roughly once a year while she was between ages six and seventeen, and asked her a series of questions taken from this set: What do you love the most? What do you hate the most? What scares you the most? What do you want more than anything right now? What do you expect from life? What does the homeland mean to you? With the cameras rolling, Anna answered these questions, first as a carefree girl, then as a naive adolescent, and, finally, as a deeply introspective young woman.
As a simple study of one girl's development into womanhood, ANNA would be fascinating enough, but Mikhalkov uses the film as a means to perform an autopsy of the changes in Russia from 1980 to 1991. Even as the director records the growth of his eldest daughter, he examines the massive upheaval in the Soviet Union -- Brezhnev's death, the quick reigns of Andropov and Chernenko, Gorbachev's rise, peristroika, the failed coup of 1991, and Yeltsin's ushering in a new era of democracy. Some of the historical footage has previously been aired on North American television news broadcasts, but many of the most fascinating clips will be unfamiliar to Western viewers. Through those, we gain insight into the mindset of the Russian people during the turbulent '80s.
As for Anna, although we watch her grow up, much of her life remains a mystery to us, as was intended. Mikhalkov is not attempting to be her biographer; he is using her responses to document universal truths about how our perspectives change with age. Nevertheless, because Anna is the one answering those questions, it's impossible to come away from this film without an appreciation of the thoughtful and intelligent woman she has become.
Here's a sampling of how Anna's views change over the years. At age six, her response to the question "What scares you the most?" is "the witch". A year later, it is "fights." By the time she's nine, however, it's "that war might break out." For many years, nuclear devastation is her most powerful fear, until her last interview, when she confesses that she is frightened that the changes in her homeland might result in "the loss of [her] inner world." Likewise, her opinion of what she loves the most evolves from nature to Soviet leaders to her family. The most poignant moment in the film occurs during the final interview, when tears streak Anna's cheeks as she tries to explain what her country means to her.
I have always been fascinated by this sort of motion picture, which implements some of the same ideas as Michael Apted's 7 UP series. This is a far more intimate portrait, however, since Mikhalkov's subject is his daughter, not a relative stranger. A great deal of time and creative energy went into ANNA, and, towards the beginning, when censorship was in full swing in the USSR, the production had to be carried out in secret, at great risk to all involved. The result is a fine testimony to the invested effort. ANNA is perhaps the best "home movie" ever made because it says so much not only about one person but about the shifting sands beneath societies and empires. We can hope that Mikhalkov keeps the promise he makes at the end of ANNA: to return in thirteen years with a sequel of sorts based on the responses of his youngest daughter, Nadia (who starred in his 1994 Academy Award winning feature, BURNT BY THE SUN), to the same telling questions.
- James Berardinelli e-mail: berardin@bc.cybernex.net ReelViews web site: http://www.cybernex.net/~berardin
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