Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Silver Skates’ on Netflix, a Bland Russian Period-Storybook Romance

Silver Skates is the first-ever Russian “Netflix Original,” the streamer scooping up international release rights after the film was a relative box office hit during the pandemic. The movie’s a period romantic Romeo and Juliet-derived drama, based in title only on Mary Mapes Dodge’s novel Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates. Will this story of a humble pickpocketer and the daughter-of-a-duke make us want to quaff vodka in celebration of it, or to endure it? Let’s find out.

SILVER SKATES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Christmastime, 1899. The dawn of a new century. The advent of electricity and horseless carriages. St. Petersburg. The city is frozen over, which makes Matvey’s (Fedor Fedotov) job delivering fancy pies easier, since he’s a speedy wizard of an ice-skater on the antique blades his father (Timofey Tribuntsev) gave him. His sickly father, who soldiers on as the town lamplighter despite regularly coughing up blood. They live in a dim-lit, windowless, spiritually warm hovel, and the old man’s TB is untreatable except by a fancy doctor in Germany. It’s good timing in the sense that Matvey just got canned from his cruddy, cruddy pie-delivery job and has fallen into a more lucrative career, joining a crew of pickpocketeers who skate through the outdoor market and snatch wallets and pocketwatches from rich folk, then return to their hideout in an old dilapidated ship for evenings rich with ribaldry and Marxism.

Meanwhile, in a very gigantic palace dwells Alice (Sofya Priss), a lovely young woman who rebels against finishing school by studying — brace yourselves — chemistry. Yes, you may GASP now. Her father is Minister Nikolai Nikolaevich Vyazemsky (Aleksei Guskov), an aristocratic dignitary whose mustache can only be described in the plural, as in “mustaches.” He hates freethinkers and troublemakers and will have none of this having-an-educated-daughter baloney. She will sit in her room and she may pet her rabbit and look nice and shut up and marry a count, Captain Prince Arkadiy Tarisov (Yuri Borisov), who has more titles of nobility than he does compelling character traits. He’s tall and blond and is a staunch defender of the aristocratic status quo, which makes him a firm believer not in love but in having an attractive human female on his arm to make him look and smell great at parties.

Coincidentally, Matvey meets Alice when he climbs up on her balcony after being egged on by the ne’er-do-wells he hangs out with. Also coincidentally, Count Prince Captain Viscount Baron von Blondguy happens to be one helluva figure skater, and is tasked with putting together the Speed Skating Gendarme Squad (the movie’s hilarious words, not mine!), a group of dudes with billy clubs who vow to stop the pickpocketing scourge that’s causing so many moneyed dickheads to be 1/1,000,000th less rich. Alice sneaks out for a date with Matvey, and he takes her to the lower decks of the Titanic; Matvey’s pops pooh-poohs his son’s less-than-honorable new gig even though it may pay for his expensive medical treatment; Arkadiy kegels a gilded stick even further up his rectum. Will the bourgeoisie fall to the proletariat? NYET SPOILERSKS.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Silver Skates is easily the most lushly candlelit, nice-looking-but-underwhelming Old World movie I’ve seen since The Man Who Invented Christmas.

Performance Worth Watching: Priss and Fedotov look nice together but that’s about it, because the script fails to give them flint and steel to light the romantic tinder.

Memorable Dialogue: Arkadiy and Alice skate-dance together at a lavish ball:

Arkadiy: I always felt a strange, almost mystical emptiness in my heart.
Alice: That’s something to discuss with your doctor, not me.

Sex and Skin: Alice tosses her top in an otherwise PG-rated lovemaking scene.

Our Take: Shakespeare meets Dodge meets Dickens meets Marx in this story that’s so canned in light syrup, it might as well be a bunch of old sardines. Thank your chosen deity the production values are uniformly nice — sets, costumes, hair, lighting are all lush with the usual period detail — therefore keeping our eyes from being as bored as our brains, which will foresee every beat of this plot with minimal effort.

The characters are as light and airy and flavorless as rice cakes, and thinly topped with the screenplay’s flavorless gruel of socio-political and gender-dynamic commentary. This movie has something to say: Women should be allowed to be intelligent and the aristocracy is bad and disconnected from reality. But this is all obvious and familiar and a load of cliches, you might say, and I’d retort, But have you seen it before with a speed skating gendarme squad? No, no you f—ing haven’t, you cynical cretins.

And yet, against the odds, the speed skating gendarme squad, which gets not nearly enough screen time, does not elevate Silver Skates above boilerplate storybook status. Michael Lockshin’s direction is just fine, the performances are just fine, the art direction is just fine. It’s the writing that’s DOA, and the movie clocks in at a draggy 130 minutes. It’s at best an empty, escapist, mostly guilty near-pleasure. It almost certainly would draw more eyeballs if it was titled Speed Skating Gendarme Squad.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Silver Skates shoulda leaned a lot heavier into the speed-skating-gendarme-squad thing.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Silver Skates on Netflix