work of a surrealist

Rating: 7/10 (10 February 2012)

After you see the first couple of scenes of this film you wonder if you are watching the work of a surrealist. The story fragments do not seem to connect and the characters are hardly appealing or even understandable. However as the film moves on the story emerges. The film is set in German occupied Russia in 1943. A young boy joins the partisans but is deafened and disorientated by a bombing attack. He wanders around moving towards his own village. Around him moves a group of German SS troops leaving carnage as they massacre the women children and elderly men in the villages. You do not see the Germans till the last part of the film but their presence is everywhere.
The climax of the film is his meeting with the SS unit as it moves into and destroys a village. In the end the film is one of the most gripping and realistic portraits of war ever made. The film has no heroes, there is no message yet the film captures you in its intensity. None of the characters are attractive and the feeling is one of realism.
In the last few years a number of films have been made about combat on the Eastern Front. For instance Enemy at the Gates and Stalingrad. Both films look like sanitised television shows by comparison. The film is both effective as a work of art and also of a portrait of the reality of a brutal conflict.