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The image is the Motherland on her knees with outstretched arms as men march off amid burning rubble, "my son, my defender!" Nothing more sacred than native soil, the Ukrainian agronomist turned soldier (Mykola Vinhranovsky) carries a pocketful with him into a military tribunal and asks for a few days to fight on the front before his punishment. ("Surname of an eagle, brains of an ass," marvels one officer.) War is an exploding widescreen, the camera rushes into a tunnel so that the battlefield on the other side opens up like an iris shot in a Griffith epic, the unmoored mind is a seesawing background that gives way to a canoe drift through caressing Nature. "A lesson in ancient history" is too much of a threat for the occupiers back home, the defiant schoolteacher (Svetlana Zhgun) might be the Soviet cousin to Maureen O'Hara in Renoir's This Land Is Mine. The second panel in Yuliya Solntseva's Dovzhenko trilogy showcases her particular brand of bravura in frame after frame: A reverse track through the slit opening of a cannon's iron shield, a composite arrangement of maps and visages that's like half a dozen Slavko Vorkapich montages piled on top each other, an overhead view of grunts crossing the moonlit Dnieper River. Mud and madness for Nazi invaders, visions of swaying flowers for freezing elders. "Measure life and death with great care," advises the general (Boris Andreyev) who presides over the couple's wedding. (Bronze statues and phantom warriors also have their say along the way.) Borzage's A Farewell to Arms in the surgery room, the next generation in a bombed-out classroom for the benefit of La Chinoise. "I want bread." "I want a submachine gun." Peasants sowing mark the new beginning, "what battle can compare with this scene?" With Antonina Bogdanova, Zinaida Kiriyenko, Sergei Lukyanov, and Vasili Merkuryev.
--- Fernando F. Croce |