Szibirszkij Csirjulnyik - The Barber of Siberia 1998

 

The Barber of Siberia 1998

Actors: ‎ Daniel Olbrychski, Elizabeth Spriggs, Julia Ormond, Oleg Menshikov, Richard Harris

Love blooms amidst the backdrop of Czarist Russia in Nikita Mikhalkov's The Barber of Siberia. Opening in 1905, a woman writes a letter to a young man in military school, who is currently being punished for refusing to say that Mozart is a bad composer. She has an important story to tell him, and our story flashes back 20 years to Russia, where American Jane Calllahan (Julia Ormond), is traveling to Moscow. Jane's father, Douglas McCracken (Richard Harris), is trying to perfect a machine that will harvest trees from the vast Siberian forests. Douglas, however, hopes Jane can charm Gen. Radlov (Alexei Petrenko), the head of a Russian military academy, into arranging the financing that will enable him to complete his work on the harvester. En route, Jane meets a friendly Russian soldier, Andrei Tolstoy (Oleg Menshikov), and the two soon fall in love. Radlov is also fond of Jane, enough so that he's asked her to marry him; when it becomes evident she'd rather be with Tolstoy, he finds himself shipped off to Siberia after allegedly attacking a grand duke. Merging romance, costume drama and slapstick comedy, The Barber of Siberia was screened at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival.