Tom Hulce is great as Ivan Sanchin, a movie projectionist whom the secret service recruits in the late 1930s to work in Stalin's cinema in the Kremlin. Hulce brings exactly the right mix of naivity and exuberance to the role. The rest of the cast is excellent, too: Lolita Davidovich, for example, plays Sanchin's wife who is being seduced or raped by Beria (Bob Hoskins), becomes pregnant and commits suicide, and Aleksandr Zbruev plays Stalin with deceptive affability. The film tells a moving story of people caught up in a political system where you routinely check who might be listening behind the door before you open your mouth, and where privacy is practically non-existant, given living conditions in communal flats with communal kitchens etc. If you want to understand modern Russia - the Russia of Vladimir Putin - watching this film will go a long way to help you: A people that has been brainwashed and terrorised by its own government in different degrees of intensity over four or more generations (life under the czars was not exactly free either), who never experienced anything remotely like democracy and where no one is used to taking responsibility, is practically bound to believe any lie its rulers are dishing up. Watch this film; it's worth it!
Review of The Inner Circle
The Inner Circle
(1991)
Do you want to understand modern Russia? Then watch this film!
13 September 2022