Soviet Cinema: A Day of Repentance

When I saw the Soviet film Repentance in Moscow last year, it was still being withheld from general distribution. Since it could only be seen at private screenings in places like the Writers Union, it had the cachet of the (relatively) inaccessible. Most Soviet friends who had managed to see it recommended it highly, but a few spoke disparagingly of heavy-handed symbolism, invoking Fellini and Bergman as director Tengiz Abuladze’s aesthetic masters, and complaining that he’d not really fashioned a style or voice of his own. Some Americans, certainly sympathetic to the “message” of Repentance, have also come away from it disappointed and wondering if the film was lauded chiefly because no one expects ...