DARKNESS FALLS

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The dacha in the country outside Moscow, the self-absorbed extended family living there oblivious to events in the outside world, the visitor whose energy and mystery stir this nest of gentlefolk -- Burnt by the Sun has the air of something Chekhov or Turgenev might have imagined.

Might have imagined, that is, if he had lived in the age of Stalin. For the year is 1936, and the central figure of Nikita Mikhalkov's marvelous film, which won this year's Oscar for Best Foreign Film, is an old Bolshevik at terrible risk, Sergei Kotov (played by the director himself). Lost in contentment with his radiant young wife and adorable child, he does not see that, far from protecting him, his stature as a beloved hero of the revolution is precisely what makes him a threat to paranoid tyranny. He knows their visitor, Dimitri, works for the secret police but worries only that this handsome, charming man, his wife's lover, may reawaken buried emotions.

But that's not Dimitri's mission. His job is to extract Sergei from his happiness quietly, without alarming anyone, and politely conduct him to prison, humiliation, death. This Sergei does not know until it is too late. And neither do we. Like him, we are disarmed by the sweetness of this life, so richly detailed by Mikhalkov. The genius of his film lies in his refusal to foreshadow, for it makes the outcome more chilling. This is how evil often comes to us, masked in geniality, on a day when the sun is shining, the music playing. And the way Sergei clings to his ordinariness even as he's carried off, trying to preserve it for his family to the end, is unbearably poignant.