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If you were a widow with a young boy in 1952 Russia, you might take up with a handsome army captain you met on a train. You both would need protection from this post-war world in disarray. And what more solid figure than this officer whose chest proudly displays a tattoo of Stalin? Only the officer is a charismatic but often cruel and despotic thief in disguise named Tolyan (Vladimir Mashkov). And the mother Katia (Ekaterina Rednikova), in love despite herself, and the 6-year-old Sanya (Misha Philipchuk), in wide-eyed adoration and fear, are stuck with a nomadic life that demands they relocate whenever their thief-protector's safety becomes chancy. This is the story as you experience it, told in voiceover years later by the boy, a romantic tale of challenged innocence as revisited by experience. And each frame, hazy and tinted with the erosion of memory, seems permeated with the distance between these two Sanyas.
That's the experiential story. But there's another one that holds up Tolyan as Stalin and the boy as the New Russia that must rid itself of the tyrant, and that story is so pat it seems dispensable. Luckily, director Pavel Chukhraj has an interesting enough visual imagination, and a keen ability to either discover or tease out engaging performances, that you can quietly shut out the easy political allegory. As played by Vladimir Mashkov, Tolyan amply translates to the audience the fascination he holds for young Sanya and his mother. In fact, all three performances hold the eye and the mind, belying any programmatic elements embodied by the allegorical plot. The Thief was a 1998 Academy Award nominee for Best Foreign Language film. --Jim Gay
Considering that Pavel Chukhrai's movie is set in the Soviet Union in the early nineteen-fifties, it's pretty easy to watch. The center of events is a young boy (Misha Philipchuk), whose mother takes up with a tall, dark, and handsomely immoral soldier called Tolyan (Vladimir Mashkov). The three of them scoot from one set of lodgings to the next, armed with little but a sack of stolen silverware; the movie is, among other things, a dark Dickensian comedy of the nomadic-of the need to live on one's wits. Despite the blue eyes of his hero, Chukhrai just about avoids the pitfalls of cuteness, and there is no mistaking his instinct for the stray anecdote and swollen minor characters. As the film moves, rather too hastily, toward its resolution, you might feel cheated by a sense of emotional patness; for the most part, however, there is real grit and sting in this slight tale. In Russian. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker
