The film starts Part 1 in December 1916, at a lavish ballroom gathering just before the Russian Revolution, then moves to 1917's February Revolution, the family's forced exile to Siberia that summer after Nicholas II's forced abdication in March, the late-1917 October Revolution Communist takeover, the start of the Russian Civil War, and the July 1918 mass shooting of the Romanov family. Afterwards, it revolves around Anna Anderson, who believes that she is Anastasia Romanov, daughter of Nicholas II of Russia. Anna first tells her story in the 1920s when she is an inmate in a Berlin asylum after her suicide attempt. Her story of escaping from the Bolsheviks who killed the rest of her family in 1918 seems so vivid that many Russian expatriates are willing to believe her. She slowly gains more trust, but Europe's Romanov exiles are very hesitant to believe her tale and send her away. In Part 2, she travels to the United States' branches of the family in New York City in 1928, while Nicholas' mother, Maria Feodorovna (Dagmar of Denmark), dies in her native Denmark. America's expatriate Romanovs also eventually publicly denounce her as an impostor and coldly snub her at Feodornova's funeral, causing her to leave the U.S. in 1931 to return to Germany. The movie culminates in 1938 with Anna deciding to sue the Romanovs in Germany's courts to force them to recognize her as Anastasia, but it never reveals if Anna really is Anastasia. The ending epilogue narration says that she eventually moved back to the U.S. and settled in Charlottesville, Virginia, where she died in 1984.
Name | |
---|---|
Marvin J. Chomsky |
No lists.
No lists.
No lists.
Please log in to view notes.