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'Ivan's Childhood' is also known as 'My Name is Ivan' in the United States. It was the first feature film of the famed Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky, who took over the project from another young director after it was rejected for "poor quality." Tarkovsky based the film on a short story by Vladimir Bogomolov, a very successful writer during the Soviet era. Supposedly, Bogomolov drew upon his experiences as a soldier in World War II but according to Wikipedia, some journalists believe that he never fought in the war and all his writings constitute a hoax!
Tarkovsky immediately established a big reputation when he won awards at the Venice Film Festival as well as the San Francisco International Film Festival in 1962. Even Ingmar Bergman was quoted as saying that "My discovery of Tarkovsky's first film was like a miracle. Suddenly, I found myself standing at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to me. It was a room I had always wanted to enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease." Not everyone was completely effusive about 'Ivan'. The NY Times critic at the time, Bosley Crowther stated, "The one exception I take to this picture, which is based on a short story by Vladimir Bogpmolov, is that its structure is a bit too frail. Its emotional communication is too dependent on its impressionistic details."
Indeed, it's the assorted palate of individual visual scenes that have drawn viewers to this film time and again. A good number stick in your mind (here are just a few): flashbacks of Ivan's mother and her subsequent demise; the dead soldiers on the other side of the river with the sign 'welcome'; Ivan being carried to bed by one of his soldier-protectors; the horses eating the apples; the soldier holding the nurse over the ravine; the graffiti of doomed partisans urging future viewers to "take revenge"; and the striking cinematography filmed on location in the marshlands near Kaniv at the Dnieper River.
Despite all these great visuals, the film still doesn't work very well due to the weak script. Since the carnage of war is only suggested (which was obviously intentional on Tarkovsky's part not to show any overt clashes between Germans and Russians), he was forced to fall back on the conflict between the Soviet soldiers and their 12 year old charge, the jaded Ivan. Tarkovsky relies on the main conflict in which Ivan insists on continuing his activities as a scout as opposed to the Russian commanders, who insist that he be taken from the front lines and placed in military school. This tedious battle goes on for much too long until two soldiers, Kholin and Galtsev, who have befriended Ivan, decide to ferry him across the river and allow him safe passage into the forest, where he'll continue acting as a child soldier (Kholin and Galtsev meanwhile retrieve their two dead comrades under the tree).
There's also a sub-plot that seems to go nowhere. Captain Kholin makes some aggressive moves on the Army Nurse Masha in the forest; you would figure that this might end up as some kind of sexual assault but nothing like that happens. The scene is probably there because simply focusing exclusively on the inert conflict between Ivan and the soldiers, cannot carry the entire narrative.
The Ivan denouement is interesting because Tarkovsky uses archival footage from the Fall of Berlin. There are some disturbing images, particularly shots of the Goebbels' children, who were poisoned by their parents in Hitler's bunker days before Germany's official surrender. He uses this footage to work in a scene where one of Ivan's soldier friend discovers the boy's ultimate fate (executed by the Nazis, by beheading!).
Ultimately, the message of a poor 12 year old orphan caught up in the horrors of war fails to have the shattering impact that most critics insist that it does. I can only surmise that many of these critics were so impressed by the dazzling virtuosity of a first time feature director's extraordinary visual competency, that any objective observations concerning plot, were lost. But there's simply not enough compelling conflict to keep this anti-war vehicle completely afloat. What's more, I understand the whole idea that Ivan's misguided thirst for revenge illustrates how war can affect an innocent child, in such a deleterious way. And of course his ultimate fate, is supposed to be quite tragic. But somehow I felt emotionally detached from Ivan probably because of the child's own detachment from reality. Tarkovsky's impressive impressionistic techniques at the same time leads to an emotional distancing. We see the dreamlike shot of Ivan's mother after she's killed but we never get to know who she is. Likewise her executioners. All we're left with is the emotionally detached Ivan and his enablers—again not a big enough canvas for compelling drama.
You might be interested in the fate of the actor who played Ivan-- Nikolay Burlyaev. Actually he's done quite well for himself: Since 1991, the founder and director of the Moscow Film Festival of Slavic and Orthodox Peoples and since 1996, founder and chairman of the International Association of Cinematographers of Slavic and Orthodox Peoples. One disturbing caveat according to Wikipedia: "In March 2014 he signed a letter in support of the position of the President of Russia Vladimir Putin on Russia's military intervention in Ukraine."
score 5/10
Turfseer 24 May 2014
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3021913/ |
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16-3-2020 03:50:11