A beautiful and sensitive film which floats between the comic and melancholy. It looks smooth, almost nonchalant, and has almost documentary moments. The film has been kept small and intimate and includes beautiful and very natural acting. The film seems to mix several styles; placid and light-hearted parts are juxtaposed with tragic scenes filmed almost coarsely. The story is not told in a linear fashion, Shukshin permits himself all kinds of detours and excursions which help make the film lively and authentic.The protagonist Egor, played by Shukshin himself, comes out of jail and makes contact with his pen friend Lyuba. Half-heartedly he decides to turn over a new leaf, but when it looks as if things will click with Lyuba, his decision gains in stature. Lyuba’s rural surroundings react aggressively and with misgivings. In their eyes, Egor remains a criminal. He also remains one in the eyes of his former cronies, the kind of gangsters modelled on American examples who take their revenge when he refuses to join them again.The Red Elder breathes the cheerful irony of the so-called thaw films from the sixties, the years when Shukshin was shaped and made his debut as a film-maker. But very gradually Shukshin adds a more dramatic element, revealing something in Egor’s past and allowing him to return to the place of his youth (where the elder tree in the title stands.)The Italian connoisseur of Soviet cinema, Giovanni Buttafava, has a high regard for Shukshin: ‘Soviet cinema has found a great and “true” author in him, maybe its archetypal author.’
