BALLAD OF A SOLDIER (Grigori Chukhrai, 1959)

Grigori Chukhrai’s Ballada o soldate, about a soldier who we know from the outset was killed in the Second World War, embodies the Russian soul.
     In 1942, as the Germans impel Soviet retreat, Alyosha Skvortsov (Vladimir Ivashov, sensitive and appealing) is nineteen years old. In a panic he manages to knock out two enemy tanks with a fortuitously found bazooka. As reward, his wish for a brief leave to visit his mother in their rural village is granted. He had left without saying goodbye, perhaps not wishing to see her tears or have her see his. Comrades give him errands to do along the way, and other events, including a luminous romance with a homeless girl and the bombing of his train, also delay him. He is able to spend only a few minutes with his mother before returning to the front.
     This lyrical black-and-white film is suffused with the fragile beauty that our knowledge of the boy’s fate imparts to everything. For my taste, there are too many instances of a Soviet cliché: low, upwardly tilted shots that set human forms and faces against an eternal sky; but most of the filmmaking befits the poetic form of a ballad that the title indicates, making the pulling back from realism at various junctures entirely correct. Yet Chukhrai also succeeds in portraying the horror and fearsomeness of war, its wreckage of dwellings and shattering of lives. Formally, then, the film is complex; its story, simple.
     Alyosha represents the ordinary Russian soldier. His decency and directness, the film implies, could be found in countless Russian soldiers before they fell. The ballad form transforms Alyosha’s death into a continuance of his spirit. It freezes him humanely in modest legend.
     Alyosha’s road journey home releases bittersweet eloquence.

BROTHERS (Susanne Bier, 2004)

There are two things I like about Brødre: it shows the devastating impact on himself and family when a war captive returns home; Ulrich Thomsen’s excellent performance as this Danish Army officer, Michael Lundberg. Nearly everything else about Susanne Bier’s film is ridiculous.
     At the beginning, before going to Afghanistan on a peacekeeping mission, Michael drives his younger brother home from prison, where he served three years for robbing a bank and assaulting a teller. At film’s end Michael himself is in prison for assaulting his wife and pulling a gun on a police officer. In between, with reference to his cell-mate, he is commanded by a Taliban, “Kill him, if you want to live.” Michael resists doing this, then does it; and because the pipe he is handed isn’t lead, the act is harrowingly long in reaching its goal. Meanwhile, screw-up Jannik has reversed his irresponsibility by taking care of sister-in-law Sarah (Connie Nielsen, insufferable) and nieces. Back home, Michael wrongly suspects wife and brother of having had sex. After all, what isn’t possible if a peacekeeper can turn killer?
     The schematic script by Anders Thomas Jensen is bedecked in soap opera. “Do you know what I did to be with you again!” a furious Michael hurls at Sarah, who cannot possibly know because Michael refuses to open up and tell anyone.
     The fraternal psychology is basic insight 101: bad kid brother is reacting against the respect showered on responsible older brother, who, it turns out, relies more than is initially apparent on his kid brother’s bad example to maintain his own fragile image of responsibility.
     Why is M.I.A. Michael’s family told he is dead after his helicopter crashes? How come the cell-mate’s toenails are perfectly trim after he has been imprisoned for three months?

TWO COMRADES WERE SERVING (Yevgeni Karelov, 1968)

Splendidly written by Yuli Dunsky and Valeri Frid, Sluzhili dva tovarishcha is an impressive and poignant Soviet war film. It takes place in 1920 as the civil war between Reds and Whites, following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, comes to a close. In the Crimea, a White Guard officer, committed to the Old Russia, suffers the loss of his cause to history.
     Yet the film is as much about two Red Army soldiers, one a photographer documenting the war and his comrade, Ivan Karyakin (Rolan Bykov, wonderful). Armed with his French camera, Andrei Nekrasov is intent on capturing the present for the future; Ivan, meanwhile, waxes lyrical about this future, but always with a twist that compromises his optimism. Here is one of the things he predicts: the elimination of all prisons—oh, except for one prison to hold counterrevolutionaries. (Actually, opponents and adversaries would be executed—as Soviet audiences, post-deStalinization, will have known.) Indeed, despite the war’s looming (for me, righteous) resolution, the film’s shift between Red and White soldiers engaged in their fierce combat suggests the fractured soul with which the conflict would leave the New Russia and the Soviet state. With “one last bullet” Andrei is taken down, and it is Ivan who must deliver Andrei’s camera to headquarters. Before falling to the ground, Andrei looks up over his shoulder at Russia’s past: a haunting image.
     Already we have witnessed, from a mountain top, a long-shot of all but one member of a White company moving to their drowning deaths in the sea rather than surrender to the Reds—deaths, the image implies, that will haunt the Soviet unconscious.
     Stark in black and white, Two Comrades Were Serving is beautifully, imaginatively directed by Yevgeni Karelov.
     Actual newsreel footage grippingly concludes it.