Anna: A Soviet soap opera with a side of betrayal

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a weird fascination with 1920s Soviet melodrama or if you’re doing a deep dive into the kind of films where everyone is perpetually angry at a factory. If you’re looking for a light watch, skip this. If you like your movies heavy with propaganda and people staring intensely at party ID cards, you might find something here to chew on.

It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs. You’ve got Yasha, who gets rejected by Anna and immediately bolts for Siberia. Classic move. Then there’s Pavel, the guy who starts a fire just to look like a hero. It’s hard to watch, not because it’s moving, but because the logic is so weirdly specific to that era.

The factory fire incident

The whole bit where Pavel is hailed as a hero for surviving a fire he basically started is just... wild. The movie really wants you to hate him, and it succeeds by making him a cartoonish careerist. There’s a scene where he’s practically twirling a mustache, even if he’s wearing a worker’s cap.

I found myself thinking about The Way of the Strong while watching this. Both films have that same stubborn, heavy-handed way of dealing with human emotion. It’s like the writers were terrified of being too subtle.

• Pavel is the worst.
• The factory scenes feel like they were filmed in a wind tunnel.
• Anna looks exhausted for 80% of the runtime.
• Yasha’s return is just as awkward as you’d expect.

There’s this moment when Anna loses her party card, and the camera lingers on her face like it’s the end of the world. Maybe for her, it was. But it’s hard to stay engaged when the pacing feels like it’s dragging a boulder up a hill. Sometimes the dialogue is so fast you miss the point, other times it stops dead.

It’s not as polished as The Racketeer, but it has a certain grit. It feels like a historical artifact rather than a story about actual people. You can almost see the gears turning in the director’s head, trying to make sure the moral of the story is crystal clear. Spoiler: communism is good, saboteurs are bad. We get it, okay?

Anyway, if you like watching people argue over loyalty in drab rooms, you’ll probably find something to enjoy. If not, maybe watch something else. It’s definitely a film that exists, and that’s about all I can say for it. 📽️