Dear Comrades!

Part of my coverage of the 56th Chicago International Film Festival.

DEAR COMRADES!   **1/2

Andrei Konchalovsky

2020

IDEA:  A fictionalized account of the events surrounding the 1962 massacre in Novocherkassk, Russia, when Soviet military and KGB personnel opened fire on protesting factory workers.

BLURB:  The great tacit irony of Dear Comrades! is that its eponymous address could apply as much to its striking factory workers as to its Communist Party officials. By situating the events of the state-sanctioned Novocherkassk massacre in an illustrious Russian timeline of dissent and suppression, director Konchalovsky makes his point about cyclical history starkly clear: the fellow-feeling comrades become the iron-fist oppressors, and they’re all too eager to shun - and repeat - the past. That the events of the film could just as plausibly be taking place in 1903 or 2020 as opposed to 1962 is partly what makes this such a chilling historical account. Andrey Naydenov’s black-and-white 4:3 cinematography, which largely forgoes modernist stylization, furthers this sense of disorienting, verisimilitudinous déjà vu. It’s when Dear Comrades! shrinks its fairly sprawling, bureaucrats-and-laborers panorama to zero in on the moral awakening of a disillusioned apparatchik that the film starts to seem contrived. Is such a bourgeois perspective the right way to frame this story of mass trauma? Might a more proletarian, polyphonic telling better rebuke the authoritarianism of the State? These questions linger, even as Dear Comrades! argues for its character study as a means of holding leadership accountable. Questionable narrative decisions aside, the film is methodical in chronicling this heinous episode of local Soviet history, and provides an appallingly relevant reminder of how willing some governments are (and not just the outwardly hostile ones) to undermine and debase the ideals of the polis.