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There are directors who, if they worked elsewhere, would surely have achieved international recognition.
Among them is Georgi Daneliya, who made the appealing, comic Autumn Marathon (1979). It is about a teacher-translator trying to balance the requirements of his overextended double career with the equally pressing demands of a suspicious wife and a possessive mistress—a situation familiar to members of the Western bourgeoisie. The movie offers an agreeable insight into the life of the educated, privileged class in the Soviet Union.
Daneliya is working safe terrain here: the romantic comedy. There are other comfortable places for a Soviet director to work—screen adaptations of classic novels and plays, for example. Pictures that show the suffering and steadfastness of ordinary citizens during World War II also win the approval of the editors —and of the public. As the Revolution of 1917—which provided the first Soviet film makers with their great subject—recedes in memory, World War II has replaced it in the country's hagiography.
Nikolai Gubenko's The Orphans (1978) takes place in a state orphanage right after the war. If the institution's staff is seen as rather too noble, the problems of the children—ranging from withdrawal to rebelliousness—are sensitively portrayed. It is a strong and absorbing work.
So is the somewhat ungainly but poetic Siberiada (1979), directed by Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky. The Soviets have lost neither their taste for, nor their skill with, the epic historical drama. Siberiada traces the history of an obscure Siberian village from snowbound primitivism and isolation at the beginning of this century through war and revolution, to the discovery of a great oilfield in the late '60s. Like Dovzhenko before him, Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky has a way of linking a peculiarly Russian feeling for the sacredness of native ground with the developing force of the revolution.
Most-favored-director status goes to Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky's brother Nikita Mikhalkov, 34. His Slave of Love was one of the few recent Soviet films to receive critical acclaim and a measure of box-office success when it was released in the U.S. last year. A touching, gently comic portrait of a movie company on location in 1917, Slave of Love shows a group of innocents trying to avoid being caught up in the revolution. In Five Evenings, Mikhalkov tells the story of a middle-aged man and woman trying to pick up the threads of a romance they were forced to sever during World War II. And in his latest film, Oblomov, he tackles the elusive, lethargic hero of Ivan Goncharov's 19th century masterwork.