The best about this movie is that it ended up to be not what it was expected. In terms of plot, it is a "Die Hard" kind of stuff in which a former intelligence officer subdues six dangerous men who are leaving a trail of blood in Siberia. In 2006, this movie seems to be nothing more than a decent adventure story with a reasonably tragic ending (the good girl and one of the good guys die) - after all, this is a Russian movie and cannot have a happy-ending. But the film was produced in 1987! What was originally meant to be a B-rated adventure story turned into the first ever widely screened Soviet movie which spoke of political prisoners and internal exiles. The "Cold Summer" is a remarkable example of the surreptitious ways dissident culture found for expressing political opinion - it is neither in the storyline, nor in the characters that we read the intended message, but in the discreet glimpses over the historical context. As of now, the movie may seem banal and even dull, but it is actually a living historical document.
Review of The Cold Summer of 1953
