A few home truths form a native Russian...

Rating: 5/10 (17 December 2011)

The film must be good, but, being Russian and having lived in Belorussia for many years, I really couldn't concentrate because of the poor Russian and equally poor acting of most so-called "Russian" cast members which were driving me up the wall. I had the impression that, with a couple of exceptions, the producers just cast a bunch of second-generation Brighton-Beach immigrants with no acting experience whatsoever because whatever poor accented Russian they could manage was as unnatural and forced as a middle-grade drama society production.
To say nothing of the fact that the film is set in Belorussia, and Belorussians have a very specific accent when they speak Russian, but the only Russian accent I heard in this film was Brighton Beach American! Ditto for whoever wrote the Russian dialogs for the film: for the most part those were the most ungrammatical and stilted lines, impossible in colloquial Russian speech. Some of them were literal translations from English that made no sense in Russian: apparently, producers had insisted on literal translation of original English dialogs (which, as every translator knows, is a recipe for disaster).
I mean, is it really so difficult to hire a native Russian script writer and a few professional Belorussian movie actors to play actual Belorussians? Why hire second-generation immigrants who can't even speak their parents' native language any more, let alone act, and present it to the world as Russian acting and Russian speech? I repeat, the film is probably very good but I hated every minute of it because the "Russian" side of it was the ugliest mess I've ever seen on screen.