Film Description
| 12 | ||
| Director: | Nikita Mikhalkov |  |
| Country: | Russia | |
| Year: | 2007 | |
| Language: | Russian / Chechen with English subtitles | |
| Runtime: | 159 minutes | |
| Rating: | PG13 | |
| Principal Cast: | Sergei Makovetsky, Sergei Garmash, Aleksei Petrenko, Yuri Stoyanov, Sergei Gazarov, Nikita Mikhalkov | |
| Trailer: | N/A | |
| SCREENING TIMES | |||
| Sunday, November 16 | 1:45 PM | Art Gallery of Windsor | |
The initial situation of "12" is similar to Sydney Lumet's film "Twelve Angry Men", in which a young Puerto Rican boy is on trial for murdering his father. In Mikhalkov's film a Chechen youth (Apti Magamaev) stands accused of stabbing to death his adoptive father, a Russian special forces officer, who rescued the boy after his parents were killed in the fighting, and brought him back to live with him in his Moscow apartment.
The story opens when the 12 jurors, all male, retire to an improvised jury room set up in a school gymnasium. As in Lumet's movie, the case seems an open and shut one, but a lone juror raises doubts. The jurors begin to argue, to talk, to reveal more about themselves and gradually, as darkness falls and snow settles in the streets outside, reexamine and even physically rehearse the evidence.
The jurors (whose names, as in "12 Angry Men," we never learn) include a chauvinist anti-Semitic taxi-driver; a charming old Jewish gentleman; a neurotic variety show performer; a scientist with a tragic past; a successful surgeon, who is himself from the Caucasus; and an entrepreneur and owner of cable television stations,who is so indecisive that he has to be reminded of the last way he voted. What gradually emerges from their deliberations is a panoramic view of Russia today, with its disappointments, multiple ills, corruption, violent internecine struggles, black humor, sentimentality and enduring hopes.
Cumulatively "12" is reminiscent of a kind of sprawling Russian novel, played out in dramatic form. The many-sided narrative that unfolds in the gymnasium is punctuated by a vivid series of flashbacks of the accused boy's experience of the Chechen wars. These fragmentary, haunting images of violence are momentary, rather than morbidly and exploitatively graphic, but suggestive of the ferocity of the conflict and the countless personal tragedies suffered by those caught up in it.
Mikhalkov's "12" has a remarkable and unexpected twist at the end. It suggests two different conclusions: one in the style of Hollywood, another perhaps more in keeping with Russian realities.
Roderick Conway Morris
International Herald Tribune
