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Gleb Panfilov about “Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus”
09.05.2010
“Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus” by Nikita Mikhalkov is a daring innovative film. Its running time is three hours. It is at once an exciting, yet tiring, stunning, yet exhausting spectacle, like the war itself!
The film presents a new cinematic format: unusual, uncomfortable, frustrating, just like any other new ingenious works of art, literature, music or even science. Similarly to the Great Patriotic War, which could not have lasted a year, a two, or three, but four, the film did not fit the timeframe of one and a half, or two hours, but only of three.
“Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus” possesses a specific code, a formula of the war, about which it is narrating. Its scope is broad and deep. It reveals a matrix of the soviet state: from the barrack of the camp, where Kotov serves his sentence and Stalin’s *dacha *in Kuntsevo, to the frontlines in the Moscow outskirts. And yet, the film is completely devoid of rhetoric or pathos; it is simple, expressive, bright and objective. This is how the entire film and the cinematic novel about colonel Kotov are constructed: ’Burnt by the Sun’, “Burnt by the Sun 2: Exodus”, "The Citadel’.
Gleb Panfilov, film director