|
|
This is a simple story really, wholesome and vindicated by the end. The boy who spies behind Nazi lines is brave and stubborn, the fierce fighting spirit of the Soviets personified in this frail, wiry young body. His action is patriotic, but also a petulant vengeance Tarkovsky insinuates. The two army officials are different sides to it, the one calm and considerate, the other brass and boisterous. The woman that serenades them is almost an afterthought, a promise of love after the carnage.
In other hands this would have been a simple crowdpleasing war drama, this is worthwhile because of how Tarkovsky makes cinema with these bare essentials. In his camera survives the legacy of Soviet film, Dovzchenko and Eisenstein. The camera that roams freely these rugged landscapes, the pensive closeups of hard faces lost in thought.
Tarkovsky's personal mark to this legacy lies in how he wants to transcend this wartorn land and strife, the plaintive desire to enter into communion with worlds beyond the field of simply living and dying. Seeing around him he recognizes things which are not of this world, and which we can surmise only by the shadows and reflections they cast around us or inside of us. Dream realities within, shadows of the mind. Reflections of the divine without, cast on still waters ready, perhaps anxious to receive them. He captures these echoes and whispers in several shots, most poignantly for me in the recon flares that keep dropping from the sky in the distance, as though lighted matches tossed from celestial fire.
He doesn't yet know how to pursue these visions or what they are, awe seems enough at this point. But it reveals a filmmaker biding time, ready to surrender himself over to God if only he would show his face. Few debuts are more cinematically accomplished than this.
score /10
chaos-rampant 3 May 2011
Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2423811/ |
|
16-3-2020 03:50:12