despite all efforts to teach and remember and learn, history repeats itself

Rating: 8/10 (4 April 2001)

A painful and haunting film set in Belarus in 1943, which opens with an old man's mystical declaration of impending doom, followed by a brief interlude of innocence between a young 12 year old boy and a young girl, but after a glimpse of a German bomber flying overhead, something like an angel of death, bombs drop, the earth explodes, the young boy loses his hearing and then bears witness to the horror of war.
Some of the imagery feels dreamlike or like a horrible hallucination, like the slowly evolving scene where he and the girl fight their way through a muddy swamp which nearly engulfs them, the horror of seeing herded, starving people, his neighbors, with nowhere to go, seen almost as corpses or ghosts in a fog, he wanders the countryside in search of food, and finds a cow, but it gets killed in the crossfire of stray bullets that appear as laser beams across an open field, he discovers one house with all the neighboring people huddled inside, a horrible scene of terror made even more horrible by the arrival of the Nazi's who round up all the people in the countryside, herd them into a church, lock then inside, and then burn them alive, while they feast and get drunk, even take photographs, like it's a festive occasion, the season of the sadists. However, this film was produced to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the Russian triumph over the Nazi's, but in 1943, the Nazi's burned 628 Belarussian villages to the ground, slaughtering all the inhabitants, literally trying to wipe these Russian people off the face of the earth. It was impossible to view this film in 2001 and not think of the recent Serbian excursion into Kosovo. Despite all efforts to teach and remember and learn, history repeats itself.
While the last hour of the film is truly mesmerizing and is a great cinematic exhibition,I believe it is more graphic than profound. Did we really need the large, expressionist facial close-ups to represent the horror? The images were powerful enough, the over-acting only diminished our emotional connection to the screen. While intense, I believe it lacks the inner complexity of an even greater Russian film, `The Ascent,' filmed in 1976 by this director's wife, Larisa Shepitko, which examines not just the graphic outer horrors, but she finds truly inspiring images that reflect the absolute insanity taking place inside these human beings; the ending of that film is simply awe-inspiring.