Scenery Rusia

If not for its impressive on-location use of Moscow, Leningrad and Lisbon, the film would be dismal indeed. For neither Connery nor able co-stars Michelle Pfeiffer and Klaus Maria Brandauer can support this rambling and often confusing spy story. Each maintains a truly dreary sense of restraint, while the few colorful characterizations are left to peripheral performers.

The story concerns the efforts of attractive Moscovite Katya (Pfeiffer) to deliver an important manuscript to London-based publisher Blair. The papers in question (no secret, here) are the complete defense capability plans of the Soviet Union. The text is the work of a brilliant scientist whose code-name is Dante (Brandauer), a man who wants to promote peace by preventing any future build up of global weapons.

With this information at hand, you`d think that the story line of The Russia House would take off and build to some dramatic crescendo. It never does. Instead, Blair and Katya gradually fall in love. It`s the biggest cliche in espionage films: The lonely and emotionally vulnerable male spy invariably turns to mush after encountering a beautiful agent for the other side.

If not for the occasionally clever bantering between British intelligence agent Ned (a smooth James Fox) and annoyingly pompous CIA man Russell (a poor job by Roy Scheider), director Fred Schepisi`s film would have no energy at all.

The film barely can sustain two hours. Thank goodness for Ian Baker`s panoramic photography and lingering view of Soviet monuments and spacious public squares. We can forgive the cinematographer his affection for repeatedly taking his camera to a window sill and then leaning out to carefully document the vista at hand.

Connery is craggy, flushed and unkempt. Pfeiffer plays a markedly brooding citizen still unsure about how to react to all the glastnost business. And the attraction of the two is lackluster.

Liu said, "I'm sure I now have a deeper understanding of the essence of art than before. I used to imitate the style of the Russian realist painters. But such imitation never went beyond pure techniques - the brushstrokes, the arrangements. Now I understand why Russia has embraced realism for so long. It's because the country's artists and intellectuals have a noble conscience."

Being a realistic painter means that Liu is naturally attracted to cameras as a method of finding and fixing the beauty he seeks. But it is always through the medium of canvass that the artist truly finds expression for the landscape he loves.

Posted by Unknown

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