Taglines: He’s Russian. That explains a lot.
The Barber of Siberia movie storyline. Love blooms amidst the backdrop of czarist Russia in Nikita Mikhalkov’s The Barber Of Siberia. The story opens in 1905 Springfield, MA, when a woman writes a letter to a young man in a military summer-training camp. He is currently being punished by one of his superiors, who forces him to wear a gas mask until he acknowledges that Mozart was a worthless composer.
The woman has an important story to tell her addressee, and our story flashes back 20 years to Russia, where American Jane Callahan (Julia Ormond) is traveling to Moscow. A man who may or may not be Jane’s father, Douglas McCracken (Richard Harris), is trying to perfect a machine, christened “The Barber of Siberia,” that will harvest trees from the vast Siberian forests. Douglas hopes Jane can charm Gen. Radlov (Alexei Petrenko), the head of a Russian military academy, into arranging the financing that will enable him to complete his work on the harvester.
En route, Jane meets a friendly Russian soldier, Andrei Tolstoy (Oleg Menshikov), and the two soon fall in love. Jane then meets and flirts with Radlov, who grows reciprocally fond of her — enough so that he asks her to marry him. When it becomes evident she’d rather be with Tolstoy, he finds himself shipped off to Siberia after allegedly attacking a grand duke. Merging romance, costume drama, and slapstick comedy,
The Barber of Siberia (Russian Translation: Sibirskiy Tsiryulnik) is a 1998 Russian film that re-united the Academy Award-winning team of director Nikita Mikhalkov and Michel Seydoux. It was screened out of competition at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival. The film was selected as the Russian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 71st Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee.
Film Review for THe Barber of Siberia
The Cannes Film Festival got off to an uneasy start last night with Nikita Mikhalkov’s saccharine three-hour melodrama The Barber of Siberia, a movie with the epic qualities of a Russian winter. By the end of it, no peasant imagined the first shy blooms of springtime more fervently than we, the audience, stoically awaited the closing credits. Moreover, Mikhalkov himself had a stately cameo as Czar Alexander III, which considering his own real-life political ambitions, was an act of hubris that had some of us muttering in the auditorium. Is there a Winter Palace we can storm?
The Barber of Siberia stars Julia Ormond as Jane Callahan, a spirited American woman who undertakes a mammoth nineteenth-century railway journey to Moscow to assist her eccentric engineer stepfather, played by Richard Harris with a straggly white beard and an unvarying (and presumably intentional) away-with-the-fairies facial expression. He has invented a bizarre new machine for cutting down trees, and which will chop through the forests of Siberia as easily as a barber scythes through a beard.
But to exploit this marvellous device, he needs state money and bureaucratic permission, and so Julia’s task is to entrance and beguile a state commissoner, General Radlov, with her raunchy beauty. But a tragic fate intervenes, and she falls passionately in love with one of Radlov’s cadets, Andrei Tolstoy, and their tempestuous affair, played out across the unforgiving Russian landmass and one hundred and eighty unforgiving minutes of screentime, ends in disaster.
Our heroine is supposed to be a woman of chutzpah and style, an independent lady traveller with a doublet-and-hose swagger and a hint of something disreputable in her past, and this persona is conveyed to us by Ms Ormond with many a hearty laugh and a toss of the head. Most unsubtly of all, she is insistently shown in the first half-hour or so smoking a cigarette in a holder, although this is a habit she mysteriously dispenses with as the movie goes on, and her love affair deepens. (I don’t think emotional crises have precisely this effect on smokers in the real world.)
Short of actually slapping her thigh, spitting a gob of baccy in the nearest spitoon with a clang, and doing an impression of Doris Day as Calamity Jane, Julia Ormond could not do more to impress her feistiness on us. The problem is that Julia, with that delicately retrousée nose and fine, almost porcelain beauty, is not convincing in this role. Once she is in period costume, she looks like nothing so much as one of the china fairies or shepherdesses with a rainbow in her hand advertised in a limited edition of 800,000 on the back of the Sunday Mirror magazine.
And Oleg Menshikov, playing Andrei Tolstoy, the mercurial young cadet officer, just sucks. In fact, he more than sucks. He blows. Alternately Puckish and spritely, then fiercely jealous of Julia’s honour in badinage with his fellow military students, then quivering all over with desire and emotional pain like a sensitive and impressionable racehorse, Tolstoy is very, very tiresome indeed. As they are having sex, with Julia masterfully astride this 20-year-old ingenu, she breathes: “My beautiful boy….” Excuse me? Beautiful? He looks like Roddy McDowall in Planet Of The Apes.
But both Ms Ormond and Mr Menshikov are let down by a terrible script, which uneasily switches between English and Russian with a little French, and the whole thing suffers from being a Russian film with American hormones injected – a dire transgenic experiment. The heavy-handed comic setpieces expose this picture’s uncertain idiom most clearly: an over-waxed ballroom floor which causes the dancers to slip over, a whoopee cushion for the cadets’ history instructor, and General Radlov getting drunk on vodka – having been persuaded against his will to take a drink by the mischievous Ormond, who punches the air and says: “Yesssss!” disconcertingly like a 90’s Camden Girl.
That the man responsible for 1995’s Oscar-winning Burnt by the Sun, can have contrived this silly and lumbering film is unfortunate. But it is told in yearning flashback, with Ormond now a much older lady, and this signals that Mikhalkov wanted to make a sort of Russian Titanic, and so hit Hollywood paydirt. But there is only one way in which Mikhalkov’s movie resembles James Cameron’s sleek all-conquering blockbuster. That sinking feeling….
The Barber of Siberia (1999)
Directed by: Nikita Mikhalkov
Starring: Julia Ormond, Richard Harris, Oleg Menshikov, Aleksei Petrenko, Marina Neyolova, Vladimir Ilyin, Daniel Olbrychski, David Nykl, Anna Mikhalkova, Elizabeth Spriggs, Nikita Mikhalkov
Screenplay by: Nikita Mikhalkov, Rustam Ibragimbekov, Rospo Pallenberg
Production Design by: Vladimir Aronin
Cinematography by: Pavel Lebeshev
Film Editing by: Enzo Meniconi
Costume Design by: Natalya Ivanova, Alla Oleneva, Sergei Struchyov
Set Decoration by: Ilya Amursky, Marina Ertanova, Aleksandr Kochubey, Danila Koltsov, Igor Morozov
Art Direction by: Jindrich Kocí, Martin Martinec, Vladimir Murzin
Music by: Eduard Artemev
Distributed by: United International Pictures
Release Date: February 20, 1999
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