`THIEF' DRAMATICALLY COMPELLING, HEAVILY METAPHORICAL.

Byline: Janet Maslin The New York Times

The first thing the handsome stranger steals in the Russian film ``The Thief'' is the devotion of Katya (Ekaterina Rednikova), a dewily beautiful young mother. The year is 1952. Katya and her 6-year-old son, Sanya (Misha Philipchuk), are traveling by train when they meet a flirtatious army officer named Tolyan (Vladimir Mashkov), who turns out to be a dangerous fraud. Except for the charm, nothing about Tolyan is what it seems.

It takes time for Katya to detect this, time spent settling into a precarious domesticity that is one of this film's best aspects. The director, Pavel Chukhrai, brings a novelistic sense of detail to evoking the dailiness of Soviet life under Stalin's regime. Drawing on his own childhood memories, he presents the bustle of communal apartments, the backdrop of grandiose Stalinist architecture, the disruption of frequent travel on trains, the specter of prison in a distant, snowy place. ``The Thief'' summons this backdrop for a three-character family story that is no less redolent of this particular era.

As dramatically compelling as it is heavily metaphorical, ``The Thief'' invests Tolyan with a symbolic importance that is difficult to miss. For one thing, he has a likeness of Stalin tattooed onto his chest. For another, his way of beguiling Katya and her watchful, saucer-eyed son is a mixture of seduction and menace, especially when he begins demonstrating for Sanya what it means to be a man. The boy, whose real father is long gone and comes back to haunt him only in fantasies, gets his first lessons in masculine intimidation at Tolyan's side.

Immediately falling for Tolyan in a burst of sudden heat, Katya agrees to pretend he is her husband so that they can move into an already-crowded apartment together. For Sanya, who shares a room with the lovers and cannot avoid noticing their ardor, the situation is awkward and intimidating from the start. The place is presided over by a sharp-eyed landlady and her shoemaker husband who raise an eyebrow or two about this family of newcomers but are kind to Sanya. They, too, had children, they reveal tersely, but their children were killed in the war.

But Tolyan has a way of disarming anyone he meets. So, the household has grown convivial by the time he resorts to a favorite trick: leading boozy toasts to Stalin and then encouraging his neighbors to visit the circus so he can be home alone. To her horror, Katya learns she has been wooed by a shrewd burglar whose affections are governed by expediency and scheming. Even more angrily, she watches Tolyan revert to lady-killing. Mashkov, a popular Russian leading man with glowering machismo and a resemblance to Antonio Banderas, makes Tolyan's allure easy to understand.

Increasingly, ``The Thief,'' one of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film, becomes a lesson in disillusionment and corruption. A young boy desperately in need of a father figure is lured and bullied into actions he knows are wrong. A woman experiences a bitter blend of love and fury. And a forceful, utterly ruthless man is able to alter their lives forever. There's as much soap opera as Stalin in this narrative. Either way, Chukhrai invests it with strong, rueful echoes that give this story of fatherly betrayal its insinuating power.

THE FACTS

The film: ``The Thief'' (R; sexual situations, partial nudity).

The stars: Vladimir Mashkov, Ekaterina Rednikova, Misha Philipchuk.

Behind the scenes: Written (in Russian, with English subtitles) and directed by Pavel Chukhrai. Produced by Igor Tolstunov. Released by Stratosphere Entertainment.

Running time: One hour, 37 minutes.

Playing: Town Center 5 in Encino; Westside Pavilion Cinemas in West Los Angeles.

Our rating: Three Stars.