Russia in WWII, and a caravan of soldiers and families is getting torn up by German gunfire while the credits are still rolling. While they hide in the woods, wounded and exhausted, Kolya goes for food, bringing along sickly math teacher Sotnikov, but their destination has been burned down so they go further, ending up at a house full of kids. Mom comes home shortly before a German patrol does, and all three are captured.
A guy with a persistent cough hiding in a loft is the biggest source of tension here – once they’re taken alive by nazis, there’s not much mystery as to what will happen next. Switcheroo: the sickly guy stays strong and calm while being burned and tortured, while the capable guy turns into a little bitch and agrees to join the nazi forces if they won’t execute him. Portnov is an especially evil interrogator, a local Belarusian choir teacher gone fully to the other side.
This won best picture in Berlin, alongside The Devil, Probably, Ceddo, Perfumed Nightmare and Padre Padrone. Shepitko had no follow-up film, dying in a car crash, but her husband Elem Klimov started prepping Come and See this same year. The doomed mother appeared in a 2003 film of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, the math teacher was in the all-star Peter the Great miniseries, and the Belarisuan nazi was Tarkovsky’s star of Rublev/Solaris/Stalker.
Michael Koresky for Criterion:
From the film’s opening images of telephone poles haphazardly jutting out of snowdrifts like bent crosses, Shepitko, with cinematographer Vladimir Chukhnov, plunges us into a nightmarishly blinding whiteness, a physical and moral winter that envelops everything in its path—except, ultimately, the victimized and beatific Sotnikov, whose slow journey toward death brings a strange enlightenment. Such redempÂtion eludes Rybak, whose ruthless desire for survival puts him at odds with the Christlike martyr Sotnikov, and Shepitko charts their twinned passages to darkness and light with a stunning arsenal of aural and visual experimentation.
