CHILDREN OF THE REVOLUTION (68)

Directed by: Peter Duncan

Starring: Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Richard Roxburgh, Geoffrey Rush

The Pitch: A radical (female) Communist in mid-50s Australia is invited to the USSR and seduced by Stalin just before his death. Her son may or may not be Uncle Joe's - but grows up into an increasingly repressive labour organiser, sporting an increasingly distinctive moustache...

Theo Sez: Dazzling more in concept than in execution but still pretty dazzling - a Cold War satire, comic fantasy, 103-minute epic and wholly original debut. Both sides are spoofed, both the anti-Red hysteria of the 50s ("I'm afraid someone's been giving your son...ideas") and the Soviet nightmare unfolding at the same time - played for gallows humour, a grim police state where the question "Who has been smoking?" automatically prompts a long litany of named names while Stalin himself reads movie mags and croons "I Get A Kick Out of You" (with Beria and Khruschev soft-shoe shuffling in the background). It's a film crammed with inventive detail - photo-montages gliding through the years, mock-interviews with the various participants, and such neat touches as our heroine's journey from Australia to Moscow mapped out in little red stars to the strains of Prokofiev ; it's also, admittedly, a bit schematic in its later stages and occasionally inconsistent in its characters (Davis's firebrand radical seems to be edging towards compromise as the film goes on, then reverts to ranting ideologue for the final section). You might say it's all periphery and no centre, especially since it's never very clear whether the present-day, Stalin-redux plot is meant as a cautionary tale or a way of showing the absurdity of Cold War politics (or, of course, neither) ; but, when the peripherals are so entertaining, it would also be ungrateful.