Very powerful

Rating: 10/10 (27 January 2007)

This is just about as powerful as a war film can get.
The year is 1943. A teenage Belorussian boy by the name of Florya finds a rifle and then joins the resistance to fight the Germans. On the way he sees all the horrors of war and thats what this film is really about.
This is one of the most powerful war films I've seen and I have seen a lot. The events aren't dramatized too much and the film manages to keep a good sense of realism. At the same time however it achieves an excellent surrealistic atmosphere by contrasting this young boy to the horrors of war that surround him. The soundtrack helps a lot in this area by not really providing music in the traditional sense but rather these very tense and powerful, slightly ambient noises. Reminded me a lot of the sound that an orchestra makes when they're getting ready right before the start of a concert. Now the film was made during Soviet times so it does show the Germans in a bad light and as very cruel but to a large extent, thats how things were. Aleksei Kravchenko, the actor portraying Florya, pulls the job off well despite his young age. He doesn't have much dialog to say and this really is more of a visual film.
To add to the artistic qualities of this film, there is also an excellent technical side. In addition to the soundtrack which I mentioned before, this film has some of the best cinematography I've seen in a long time. Director Elem Klimov makes excellent use of the steadycam with which he follows his characters as they go from one place to another and without cutting away. There are two excellent examples of this: First is when Florya comes back to his village and the camera follows him as he comes down a hill, goes into his yard and then into his house. The second is the last shot in the film which follows a collumn of soldiers, then takes a brief detour (which is more of a shortcut actually) into a forest and then rejoins that group of soldiers some time later. Simply awesome. The battle scenes are very intense, especially one of a group of German soldiers taking out a village. What I really liked was that everything seemed genuine. During one scene where a bomber bombed a forest, you could really see the dirt being kicked up and trees falling down.
An absolute must see film.