Released 1996
Stars Richard Roxburgh, Judy Davis, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, Rachel Griffiths, F. Murray Abraham
Directed by Peter Duncan

Children of the Revolution opens in 1951 Sydney, where die-hard communist Joan Fraser (Judy Davis) is drumming up support to defeat a ballot referendum that would outlaw the party. Joan's mantra, which she utters at every possible opportunity, is taken directly from Marx: "From each according to his capacity to each according to his means." One of her fellow communists, a conventional fellow named Zachary Welch (Geoffrey Rush), proposes marriage, but Joan refuses, claiming that she's not in love with him.

Every week, she writes a new letter to her hero, Joseph Stalin (F. Murray Abraham). When the dictator finally gets around to reading her missives, he is so touched by her enthusiasm that he arranges for her to visit Moscow for the 1952 Communist Party Conference. There, on the night that Stalin dies, she sleeps with both him and an Australian/Russian double agent (or perhaps triple agent) named David Hoyle. Nine months later, when Joan is back in Sydney and married to Zachary, she gives birth to a baby boy. But is the child the offspring of Stalin or Hoyle?

Smartly written and adroitly developed, Children of the Revolution fires verbal and visual volleys at multiple bullseyes, from communism and Stalin to the news media and McDonalds. Not all of the satirical jabs hit their mark, but there are so many of them that most of the misses go unnoticed. And several that do work are just short of brilliant. One of the more absurd scenes has Stalin singing and dancing to "I Get a Kick Out of You". There's also a sequence that details a "macabre and barbaric" means of breaking a hunger strike: blow the scent of sizzling bacon into the cell of the striking prisoner.

Summary by James Berardinelli