Ian Frazier recently wrote about his journey from St. Petersburg to the Pacific Coast, through the vast and haunted openness of Siberia. The New Yorker published some of his notes in two parts: here. It’s some good reading, and it brings to mind a few films that venture into the same unknown territory. In film it has often been the same two things we see in the Russian hinterlands: wintery landscapes and endless, crippling cold. Frazier gives us glimpses of more varied trials, all fairly equally depressing. He tells us about cities made of criss-crossed wires and snaking highway ramps, old women who sit by the road, selling no one knows what, swarms of mosquitos in dusty roadside campsites, and surprisingly delicious milk and dairy.
Films use Siberia as a setting to invoke isolation and banishment, drawing on the real feelings of Russians who had experienced political or criminal exhile in the thousands of kilometers of interior territory, where the Eurasian and the North American plates meet. It is the place where no one goes, and anyone who is there in film is usually present to experience pain in lonlieness or wartime grief.
It is also, in comedy, a space where the absolute nature of cold and freezing conditions are used to represent the ridiculous. Dom DeLuise’s trip to Siberia in The Twelve Chairs is made funnier only by the full-length fur he slings over his body to go grovel at the feet of a Soviet official. Dom DeLuise in fur is funny. So is Woody Allen (in Love and Death) dressed for war. These two are my favorites on the list, despite the hypnotic effects of Dr. Zhivago.
1) White Knights (1985 and not on Netflix…fail)
There is a scene in this film in which Gregory Hines and Mikhail Baryshnokov get together in a big room in Russia and they dance. And dance. And dance. Yes, they light up the frigid atmosphere.
2) Dr. Zhivago (1965) 
If colors can be used to describe the way a film affects the viewer, and I think they can, then there is a pretty obvious choice for this one. Not just white, but a bright, violent white sustains this adaptation of the Boris Pasternak novel. I’ve found Gatsby’s pink suit in Robert Redford’s portrayal of him in The Great Gatsby to be one of the few reasons I can watch that film and enjoy it. His yellow car seals the deal.
3) The Twelve Chairs (1970)
Every part of this Mel Brooks film set in post-Bolshevik Russia that should work, does. The film is adapted from a popular Russian novel written in the late 1920s by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov. Dom DeLuise, as an opportunistic priest who hears about a woman’s hidden fortune while listening to her last confession, can savor an unscrupulous role like few other comedians. Frank Langella hams up his performace as Ostap Bender, a gorgeous vagrant, just enough, but not too much that he upstages the central conceit of the film. That is, humans are petty, conniving cowards, and in the end, we all get kapput. Early Soviet Russia is a pretty fair setting for such a theme. The best we can do is hope for the best, and expect the worst, Brooks says.
4)War and Peace (1956)
5)Love and Death (1975) 
Woody Allen’s knowledge of himself as a lover not a fighter is rarely brought to light in quite this way, in which he is actually forced to fight. Diane Keaton returns two years later to play Annie Hall opposite Allen’s Alvy Singer in a modern New York love story that turns the comedy in Love and Death into a ripened work of love and life.
6) Transsiberian (2008)
–Heather Struck
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