Back in the 1990s, when I lived in London, a friend of mine urged me to see “Burnt By The Sun,” by the great Russian actor-director Nikita Mikhalkov. The film revolves around an eccentric artistic family surviving at their elegant dacha in the hinterlands of Stalinist Russia, not insignificantly because the daughter has married a revolutionary hero, Colonel Sergei Kotov (played by Mikhalkov). The film won the academy award for best foreign film in 1995, but I only just got around to seeing it.

I was floored by the experience. The story is about how the daughter’s childhood love comes back from the past, to destroy the family during one of Stalin’s routine terror-purges. Mikhalkov’s's great talent as a director and actor is that he sympathetically conveys both the revenge-driven former boyfriend and the nationalistic revolutionary hero that he has killed – both are destroyed by Russian history and Stalin. I learned a great deal about the old Soviet Union from this film, which, appropriately, Mikhalkov devotes to all of Stalin’s victims.

Intrigued by this small masterpiece in film making, I went down to our local DVD store to pull another of Mikhalkov’s works. Expecting it would be a disappointment, after “Burnt by The Sun,” I found lightning can strike twice. In “12″, Mikhalkov does a masterful homage to Sydney Lumet’s “Twelve Angry Men,” with 12 jurors deciding the fate of a Chechen boy who is accused of murdering his Russian step-father. It is, again, film-making at its unqualified best. It is no way a remake of Lumet’s work, but a distinctly Russian original, and the scenes of the Chechen boy dancing were alone enough to make me want to jump on a plane and visit culture-rich Russia and its various ethnic groups.

In real life,  Mikhalkov is associated with severely nationalistic political views, but in his films at least he conveys a great deal of humanity and sympathy for individuals of all stripes victimized by Russia’s bloody history.

No question about it: Mikhalkov is the real thing. An artist.

A tough tale: Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring

One of the surest signs of a great film is how much it haunts you after the screening. I know I have seen something top-drawer when I am brushing my teeth, backing the car into a parking spot, having a cup of afternoon coffee – and  scenes from a movie seen months ago suddenly pop into my head. By this yardstick the South Korean film made by Ki-duk Kim in 2003 – called “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring” – has to be among the best films I have seen this year.

My friend Lizanne Merrill urged me to see the film, knowing, as she does, it has some parallels with the novel I am writing now, called Buddhaland Brooklyn. Both my book and Kim’s film are about a Buddhist priest and a temple and their various transformations over four seasons. Kim and I are, in fact, calling on an established Asian literary tradition where the four seasons are not to be viewed as a literal sequence of linear time, but symbols of transformations taking place within a person during an entire lifetime.

But there our two works part company. I don’t want to give away the plot here, but Kim’s film is about an aging Buddhist priest and his young acolyte, and it’s a very stark and shocking human story that unfolds against an incredibly bucolic and tranquil-looking temple grounds and setting. The film is really about passion and attachments and the reason for being and the illusions of life and, most importantly, about karmic retribution. That, I think, is what this movie is really about. Most Westerners have a sanitized and shangri-la image of Buddhism, where tolerance and wisdom are the key bywords, but in reality many Buddhist sects are as fundamentalist and rigidly doctrinaire as any sects found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. I think this film does a brilliant job bringing the doctrine of karma to life. No-character in this film –  and I mean no-one – can escape the karmic ripples and repercussions of their actions. Watch closely to what happens to the mother, towards the end of the movie, after she abandons her out-of-wedlock child at the temple.

Kim is like Hitchcock – a seemingly inconsequential act instantly creates karma that ripples disastrously through the universe. So do yourself a favor. Rent a copy of “Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring”. It’s an eye opener.