Atomnyy Ivan (2012) Reviews

• Funny, intelligent, literate, lyrical and lightly ironic

  co_gringo2013-04-28

  Cute, low-budget Russian movie; romantic/comedy (believe or not, I saw it in Russian with subtitles on a United flight from Europe in April 2013). Yulia Snigar is beautiful and intelligent as the aspiring physicist girlfriend/love interest Tanya, who repeatedly tells her also brilliant but underachieving physicist-cum-technician boyfriend Ivan (Grigoriy Dobrygin) she doesn't want to see him anymore, but keeps seeing him anyway. They end up in the same community theater production (not much else to do, apparently). Lots of contrasting Russian/Soviet themes/images - Tanya with her iPad,in an old Soviet apartment, the older women in Ivan's family as smart, able halfway crazy atomic workers, the lyrical community theater producers trying to find life in an ex-Soviet backwater, the unimaginative atomic workers, the mass panics from the mystery fire in the nuclear plant (and distrust of official explanations), the Russian school tour of the nuclear plant after the fire, the school kids touching Tanya's belly after she tells them she is pregnant (revealed there the first time), the repeated bureaucratic scheduling conflicts the theater has with ballet classes, folk dancing rehearsal, etc. Real ironic Russian touches start from the opening sequence (claims to be a production of the Russian Atomic Energy Commission). Fantasy sequences of Tanya as an atomic Marilyn Monroe with her lab coat being blown up and and as a giggling bimbo impressed by the more worldly theater producer in a fancy Russian seafood restaurant are memorable. Film is both much more culturally literate and scientifically literate than most US/Western movies (writers not only speak of Russian literature, but actually appear to know much more about nuclear engineering than China Syndrome's did). Parts of the film appear to have been actually shot in/around a real nuclear power station - the radiation detection gear and procedures are real, not some Hollywood bastardization. All of this is just over the first half of the movie - the plane landed, and I didn't get to see the rest. Seems to be unavailable on DVD in the US. I'd love to see the 2nd half - not a work of high art, but funny, intelligent, literate, lyrical and lightly ironic. Not worth another flight to Europe, but I'd go out of my way to see it again.

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