SIBERIADE
Andrei Konchalovsky’s grand, inebriated epic “Siberiade” has suffered a great deal of abuse since it won the special jury prize in Cannes in 1979. Originally a film in four parts that ran over four hours, it had been reduced to 190 minutes and its structure had been obliterated by 1982, when Vincent Canby reviewed its New York opening for The New York Times. Subsequent video versions have clocked in at 206 minutes, but a new DVD release from Kino International fills out the film to a satisfying 260 minutes — although there is a German DVD out there that promises 275.
Even its title has been rendered as “Siberiade” and “Siberiada,” though the first seems closer to Mr. Konchalovsky’s intention, which, as he told the French press in 1979, was to create a Siberian “Iliad,” a regional epic that would give the great Siberian wilderness a sense of history and identity. But “Siberiade” is not as sublimely Homeric as it is grippingly melodramatic and visually extravagant — a sort of Slavic “Gone With the Wind” filmed under the mystical influence of Andrei Tarkovsky, the visionary Russian filmmaker with whom Mr. Konchalovsky occasionally collaborated as a screenwriter.
American audiences might also detect a hint of “Rich Man, Poor Man”: “Siberiade” tells of the generational conflicts of two families, apparently the only inhabitants of the tiny, remote village of Elan, posed on a hilltop between the banks of a river and the black depths of a primeval forest.
One family, the Ustyuzhanins, is a wily, free-wheeling bunch of proletarian eccentrics, given to drink and grand projects. The family patriarch has dedicated himself to single-handedly hacking a road from the village to a mysterious swampland known as “The Devil’s Mane” (at least in the somewhat eccentric English translation on the Kino disc), where noxious gases bubble, and man fears to tread. The Solomins, on the other hand, are plump, red-headed burghers who traffic in pelts and live in a mansion built of logs.
The story, divided by decades, begins with the first stirrings of revolt. A Bolshevik bomb maker, escaped from an imperial prison camp, makes his way to Elan and initiates the young Afanasy Ustyuzhanin (Vladimir Simonov) into the dynamics of the class struggle. Grown to adulthood, after a lyrical hour or so that includes an invasion of czarist troops and the construction of an ice boat, Afanasy runs off to join the revolution with the flower of the Solomin clan, Anastasya (Natalya Andrejchenko). This seals the enmity between the families and sets up the political conflict that will underlie the interpersonal drama of the next 70 years.
The pleasure of this kind of epic filmmaking lies in the gradual accumulation of details and the slow drawing together of plot strands, until the grand design is finally revealed. By the time Afanasy and Anastasya’s son, Aleksey (played by the director’s brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, a well-known filmmaker in his own right), returns to Elan as an adult, he is an engineer in charge of drilling for oil. The youngest Solomin, Filip (Igor Okhlupin), is a Communist Party cadre directing the development of Siberia from Moscow.
But Mr. Konchalovsky and his brilliant cameraman, Levan Paatashvili, take every opportunity to wander away from the plot line and revel in lyrical imagery. The film seems drunk on its own lushness and scale, with a hand-held camera spinning through the marshes, and newsreel sequences edited in a perfect imitation of Dziga Vertov’s “Kino-Eye” films of the 1920s, propelling the action down the corridors of history.
Not long after the release of “Siberiade,” Mr. Konchalovsky crossed to the West, where his career has oscillated between richly poetic projects like “Maria’s Lovers” (1984) and “Shy People” (1987), and commercial oddities like “Runaway Train” (1985) and “Tango & Cash” (1989). His best-known recent work is probably the 1997 television mini-series “The Odyssey,” with Armand Assante and Bernadette Peters — a bookend to his Siberian “Iliad,” if not its artistic equal. (Kino, $29.95, not rated).
SEVEN SWORDS
Another abused epic, this time from Asia, Tsui Hark’s “Seven Swords” opened the Venice Film Festival in 2005 and promptly disappeared from view. It appears now in a double-disc edition from Genius Products, which contains the 151-minute Venice cut, as well as a selection of “deleted and extended scenes,” presumably all we will ever see of the three-hour film Mr. Hark originally intended to make.
The scrappy exuberance of Mr. Hark’s early films, like “Zu Warriors From the Magic Mountain” (1983) and “Peking Opera Blues” (1986), was instrumental in introducing Hong Kong films to the West. But with the Hong Kong cinema in a financial crisis, Mr. Hark has been driven to join his mainland Chinese colleagues Chen Kaige (“The Promise”) and Zhang Yimou (“Hero”) in manufacturing martial arts epics in the inflated international style of Ang Lee’s “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”
“Seven Swords,” based on a novel by Liang Yu-shen but clearly in debt to Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai,” is a historical fantasy about a band of warriors who employ the seven magic weapons of the title to save their small village from an army of mercenaries charged with wiping out all the martial arts practitioners in China. (Good luck with that.)
The large budget and solemn tone of the international style seem to stymie Mr. Hark’s creativity rather than liberate it, and “Seven Swords” has little of the spontaneity and sheer wackiness of Mr. Hark’s best work. Despite the straightforward plot, the movie feels like a hopeless mess, with Asian stars like Donnie Yen, Leon Lai and Kim So-yeon lost in interchangeable, generic roles and no clear lines of development.
Mr. Hark retains his talent for amplifying action through camera movement — there is some beautiful crane work here. But the film seems stuck in the same banging, clanging groove for much of its running time. Genre buffs will enjoy seeing Liu Chia-liang, the veteran director (“The Eight Diagram Pole Fighter,” “The 36th Chamber of Shaolin”) who might be described as the John Ford of Kung Fu, in a leading role, though the film’s other pleasures are sparse. (Genius Products, $24.95, not rated).
ALSO OUT TODAY
DOCTOR WHO: THE COMPLETE SECOND SERIES The long-running BBC time-travel adventure show, now starring David Tennant, in its 2006 season. Six discs. (BBC Warner, $99.98, not rated)
THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE: THE BEGINNING The 2006 prequel to Tobe Hooper’s 1974 splatter fest, directed by Jonathan Liebesman, now available in an unrated edition. (New Line Home Video, $28.98)
