Dear Comrades – 7.5
A retrograde anti-propaganda film, if such there be, taking down Soviet Communism for its top-down bureaucracy that creates inequality, inertia, oppression and distrust. Filmed in black-and-white and recalling Russian cinema of the late ’50s (The Cranes Are Flying, Ballad of A Soldier, etc.), Andrei Konchalovsky’s take on a 1962 workers’ strike that was brutally suppressed is cleverly told through the story of a committed Party member who is, conflictedly, a mother. If the plot was an eery parallel of Quo Vadis, Aida?, the depiction of the USSR echoed the mini-series Chernobyl.
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