Nikita Mikhalkov, variously tagged a Stalinist, genius or opportunist, hit back at critics as his wartime epic, the most expensive movie ever made in Russia, rumbled into Cannes on Saturday.
"Burnt By The Sun 2: Exodus", a set-piece World War II sequel to his Oscar-winner shot 15 years back, kicks off with a scene showing Stalin's face shoved into an excessively large creamy cake.
"People can love me or hate me or find my films more or less good, but to say my latest movie glorifies Stalin is pure madness," Mikhalkov told a French paper.
Slammed at home for hob-nobbing with the political elite and ruling the country's Union of Cinematographers with an iron hand, Mikhalkov cast two of his children in the movie, which earned lukewarm praise from Cannes critics.
Its aim is to give a Russian take on Stephen Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" according to which "the Allies alone won World War II," he said.
Eight years in the making with a record 40-million-dollar budget, the highly-wrought two-and-a-half hour drama unspools in the trenches and battlefields of World War II as Germans arrive, killing and raping as they go.
Using hundreds of extras, Mikhalkov shows legions of civilians fleeing Luftwaffe attacks and motley groups of criminals and Gulag detainees turned soldiers joining fresh-faced youngsters from the Kremlin guard on the front.
"It's not a war film, it's a love film staged against the backdrop of this terrible war and Stalinism that is the real centre," he said.
