It has been a long time since we saw his Slavic stature on our screens. We could nearly catch a glimpse of him in "Femme Fatale", the last De Palma's film, because the "film in the film" used by the American cineaste is indeed "East-West" by Regis Wargnier, the last film in which the Russian actor Oleg Menshikov acted.
Fortunately an original film comes to refresh our memory. It took "Prisoner of the Caucasus" by Serguei Bodrov 6 years to trace its path towards a distribution in the French theaters, after its presentation at the "Quinzaine des Realisateurs" in Cannes in 1996. So we can see again this actor, who played effectively the part of a NKVD official, trapping the colonel personified by Mikhalkov in his beautiful "Burnt by the Sun" (1994). The "bad" guy of the story, still in love with the pretty wife of his adversary, was damn charismatic: we have discovered then an actor having the advantage of a solid experience on stage and at the movies, where he started his career when he was 20, in particular, in Mikhalkov's film "Rodnya".
At present, the Russian cinema goes through many structural and economic difficulties, so it is difficult for Russian actors to lead a steady career without interruptions. From time to time, they have to go outside of their motherland (if still the projects succeed, as this "Duel" by Chekhov that the Rumanian director Lucian Pintillie in vain tried to put on with him) or they have to hope for "slipping the right coach" of an exportable film.
It is the case of this "Prisoner of the Caucasus" and we rediscover a heart-and-soul temperament - the legendary Russian excessiveness? - thanks to this character of a professional soldier taken hostage by rebels, with a young recruit who does not share necessarily his convictions... Let's hope, in any case, that we will have many occasions in the future to see again this great actor, so that his name may not resound among the new generation of film enthusiasts as the one of an unlikely centre forward of the Dynamo Kiev...

Submitted by Juliet Regibot