Outskirts Reviews

To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect from this movie but since it was included in the ‘They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They?’ list, I thought I might as well check it out. Well, I have seen a few Soviet movies during the last months and they were usually all rather hard to digest. Indeed, with such Soviet propaganda features, the characters are not developed whatsoever, instead, they focus more on such concepts like, for example, the proletariat was/is a specific entity. However, this movie turned out to be even more difficult to decipher though. Seriously, even though I saw it just yesterday, I’m still not sure what it was all about. The best I can come up with was that they wanted to display the last years of the Russian empire and how WWI was basically the last drop launching the first revolts and basically the whole Russian revolution. As a result, you get a fairly negative view on WWI which was basically a useless war during which  the Russian soldiers were fighting some poor German soldiers who had more in common with them than with the Tsar and aristocrats who sent them to this bloodbath. There were also some interesting artistic choices. Indeed, even though there was some sound, it was never, let’s say, complete. For example, if someone would talk, that’s the only thing you would hear. Or when there would be some crowd scenes, you would hear only the clopping of the horses’ hooves. There were also some really unexpected funny moments when some characters would pull out their tongues or would wink at the camera. Anyway, to conclude, even though I didn’t feel much connection with the damned thing, it was still an interesting watch and I think it is worth a look, especially if you like the genre.