Dear Comrades!

[T]hese crisp, high-contrast images speak to another impulse as well: to look into a past shrouded in the fog of delusion and doublespeak, and to see through it with a clarity that burns and even heals.

It's Konchalovsky regular Vysotskaya who stays with you, as a complex heroine whose utopian Soviet dream is gradually unravelling. It's a remarkable performance at the center of a devastating film.

The script is filled with flat, rhetorical speeches that are done no favors by Konchalovsky's static direction.

Setting political movies in the past is an easy, usually safe way to signal virtue. But with its eerie resonances of 2021 reports from Moscow to Washington D.C., this monochrome aesthetic object looks like something that draws real blood.

"Dear Comrades!" may not make perfect sense of the past, but it goes a long way in allowing people to look at it with a clarity that manages to be exacting and compassionate at the same time.

Throughout, Konchalovsky juxtaposes wide-ranging events with seemingly insignificant details to dramatic effect.

By the film’s conclusion, the repetition of pledges and party songs have taken on a cold, angry edge under the remaining characters’ manic coping. DEAR COMRADES! argues that all are culpable.

The irony is beyond blunt, the film increasingly distended, its impressive reconstruction not leading anywhere particularly beyond “the early ’60s were not a great time in USSR history.”

The style never reaches hyperbolic levels, even when the chaos descends on the streets, yet the storytelling remains incredibly captivating.

The Dear Comrades! lead runs into the machinery of the government she loved - and witnesses the apathy firsthand. Can't get blood off the streets? Have a party and pour a new layer of asphalt.