Ballada o soldate

Plot synopsis:
A middle-aged farm woman walks through her village and gazes down a country road. A voiceover reveals that her son was killed in the war and buried in a foreign land.
On the Eastern Front, nineteen-year-old soldier Pvt. Alyosha Skvortsov (Vladimir Ivashov) single handedly destroys two attacking German tanks, more out of self-preservation than bravery. His commanding general wants to give him a decoration, but Alyosha asks instead for a leave to see his mother and to repair the leaking roof of their home. He is given six days.
During his journey, he sees the devastation the war has wrought on the country and meets various people. When the jeep Alyosha is riding gets stuck in the mud, Private Pavlov helps push it out. As Alyosha will be passing through his home city, Pavlov persuades him to take a present to Pavlov's wife. Pavlov's sergeant reluctantly parts with two bars of soap, the entire supply for their platoon.
At the train station, Alyosha helpfully carries the suitcase of Vasya, a soldier discharged because he has lost a leg. Vasya does not want to go home, as he would be a burden to his wife, and their relationship had already been troubled. However, he changes his mind and is welcomed with open arms by the loving woman.
When he attempts to board a freight car of an army supply train, Alyosha is stopped by Gavrilkin, a sentry. However, a bribe of a can of beef eases Gavrilkin's fear of his lieutenant, a "beast". Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko) later sneaks aboard as well, but when she sees him, she becomes frightened and tries to jump off the speeding train. Alyosha stops her from risking her life. She tells him she is going to see her fiancé, a pilot who is recuperating in a hospital. As the days pass, she loses her fear and mistrust of him. Gavrilkin spots the civilian stowaway, forcing Alyosha to bribe him anew. When the lieutenant discovers the unauthorized passengers, he lets them remain aboard and even makes Gavrilkin return the bribe.
At one stop, Alyosha gets out to fetch some water, but the train leaves without him. Frantic, he gets a lift to the next station from an old woman truck driver. He is too late; the train has already departed. However, Shura got off and is waiting for him. The couple then go to see Pavlov's wife. They discover that she is living with another man and leave. Alyosha returns, takes back the soap he had given her, and gives it instead to Pavlov's invalid father.
When they finally part, Shura confesses she lied; there was no fiancé, only an aunt. Alyosha realizes too late, after his train departs, that when Shura said she had no one, she was telling him that she loves him. His train is stopped by a blown-up bridge and set on fire by German bombers. With time running out, Alyosha rafts across the river and persuades another truck driver to give him a ride to his rural village, Sosnovka. He gets to see his mother only for a few minutes before having to make his way back to his unit. His mother vows to wait for him. The voiceover tells us that while he could have gone far in life if he had lived, he will always be remembered simply as a Russian soldier.

Tags: romantic

Review:
(The Red Army did not give its soldiers any time off in the ordinary way.) He tries to get back to his home village long enough to put a new roof on his mother's shack of a house, but is delayed en route, and has time only to greet her and say goodbye before returning to duty and death.Alyosha is swimming against the tide.
but we remember him just as a soldier- a Russian soldier." Not as a Bolshevik comrade, not as a freedom-fighter against fascism: the film is true to the truth of the "Great Patriotic War", in which millions of Alyoshas fought and died for their patch of earth, not for ideology or Stalin.Chukhrai's later movies have not been seen widely in the West.
The beautiful and moving Ballad of a Soldier tells a personal story that illuminates how war can ravish both an individual and a country.
Instead of accepting a medal, he requests to be granted a four-day leave to go home and visit his mother.We learn early through the narration that this soldier did not survive the war so his journey home to visit his mother for one last time becomes all the more poignant.
Reluctant at first and fearful of Alyosha, the young couple experiences their first love in several sensitive scenes but it is to be short-lived.Ballad of a Soldier, of course, aims to present Russian soldiers in the best possible light yet Chukhraj does not hesitate to show his characters as real human beings with flaws.
In Alyosha, Chukhraj has created a good person: kind, loving, and noble but not larger than life, a soldier perhaps typical of millions of young men who gave their lives to protect their homeland.
Alyosha, a 19-year old private in the Soviet army, more or less by accident neutralizes three German tanks and is allowed to return home to see his mother and fix her roof on a six-day leave.
The movie depicts the people he meets on his way home through war-torn Russia.This is an amazing film, a kind of shaggy-dog story and one you are not liable to forget.
Be that all is it may, whatever the film's affinities with Pudovkin masterpieces such as 'Earth' and 'Deserter', 'Ballad of a Soldier' is all heart, empathy and sincerity, and it will clutch at your heart-strings.The boy is not yet jaded in the grown-up fashion, and the people he meets stir him into immediate sympathy, Alyosha is simply one of the most likable characters you will encounter in a film, without being trite or cutesy.
Director Grigori Chukhrai, himself Ukrainian, seems to know that his role, in the Khrushchev era of Cold War USSR, is to show the best of the Soviet heart and soul.The journey, for the viewer, is often filled with silence, and with carefully composed shots of the boy, alone or with other travelers (often soldiers).
Many times the key face in foreground is sharp and softly stark while many other faces fall out of focus around this, camera tilted, or looking up, with flickers of light from trees outside the train window or a diffused glow of a grey sky drenching it all with melancholy.Alyosha, the young man who by some fast wits and luck knocked out two tanks in the first scene and earned this special trip, meets a variety of people on his way who each represent a part of the Soviet (mostly Russian, but with a nod to Ukrainians) experience: a wounded man going home without his leg, a young conscript heading to the front to probably never return, this same young man's father in a hospital apparently dying, and a girl his own age, equally pure and nearly untouched by life's horrors.
Because, the wounded man meets his wife at the station and is renewed, the young conscript is cheerful and hale, the father is proud and glad his son is a good soldier, the mean officer has an understanding heart, the sergeant gives his only soap to the traveller, and so on.
After all, Alyosha has found the truest of true love, and even though he may be returning to the war to never return, the boy and girl have elevated each other, and the movie, and the viewer, with a real sense of what being good is all about.
If there is a film which all human beings must watch, it is "Ballad of a soldier" made by the great Russian cinéaste Grigori Chukrai.
"Ballada o soldate" has one of the most poignant sequences of all war movies:when the mother holds only for a few minutes, her dear boy in her arms,it's impossible to hold back your tears .I saw the movie for the first time thirty years ago and I have never forgotten it.Far from politics ,"ballada o soldate" is an universal poem,enhanced by a magnificent grandiose score,which enhances the simple beauty of the pictures,climaxing on a symphony for the finale.Aliocha's furlough is so short (48 hours) and it's such a long way to his dear home.His journey becomes an odyssey ,but ,unlike Ulysses,his happiness will be short-lived.He and the girl form one of the most touching,lovable and innocent couple you will see on a screen.Their simple joys ,particularly when they share the soldier's food,or when they meet again in the desert station,are the ones which make a life worthwhile,even in the hell which surrounds them.Sometimes recalling Sirk's " a time to love and a time to die"(1958)from Erich Maria Remarque ,the great German pacifist writer,with which it shares the same disgust of war ("I wanted to film a subject which could condemn war",the director said),"ballada o soldato" is one of these rare movies that will reward you each time you watch it..
"Ballad of a Soldier" along with "Andrei Rublev" is one of my favorite Russian films ever and one of the great movies made in USSR during Khruschev´s so-called "thaw" period in the late 1950s and early 1960s when soviet filmmakers got a certain amount of an artistic freedom and were less controlled by the Soviet state.Directed and co-written by master Russian filmmaker of a soviet era, and also a WW-2 veteran, Grigory Chukhrai, who was even nominated for this picture for Academy Award for Best Screenplay, the film is set during WW-2.
It´s a story of 19 year old Russian soldier who as a reward for a heroic act in fighting with Germans given a 3 day leave home by his commanding officer.
Nevertheless, his perseverance to bring this work to life and the touchingly realistic performances of the cast make of this movie not only one of the best films that ever came out of the Soviet Union but also a classic gem of world cinema..
He wasn't a larger than life hero, he was just an adolescent, and that's why it was so easy for me to enter his skin in my imagination; I was also an adolescent, I also was not larger than life, and I was also supposed to fall in love, as he did.Grigori Chukhrai made this movie in 1959, three years after Сорок первый (another gem), and two years before Чистое Небо (a movie trying maybe to say too much, this time, but definitely with some unforgettable moments).And let's mention here the names of the actors who played the two young innocent lovers: Vladimir Ivashov and Zhanna Prokhorenko..
During his journey home, Alyosha helps a cripple dashed veteran to meet his wife; embarks as clandestine in a train and falls in love with the stowaway Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko) that is traveling in the same wagon to visit her aunt; meets the unfaithful wife of Pavlov, a soldier that is in the front and misses her, to give soap to her.
Thus he must abandon the injured soldier with whom he could have been friends; he must risk losing the love of his life because trains must run on wartime; he must leave his mother, without even time to fix the leaky roof.
The dedication at film's end may be to the Russian soldier, but the subtext throughout aims at the universal, regardless of time, place, or nationality.Thus 50 years later, the movie remains a timeless humanist classic.
At the very beginning, the mother of the young, hero soldier who is the central character of the film looks out at the one unpaved road that leads in and out of her village.
When he was going to be decorated by the commander in chief, the young soldier and already hero, he asks to him of favor allows to change his decoration him by a visit of a few days to his mother.In the way to his maternal house, he finds to a young girl in a load train, falling in love, having themselves both that to dismiss to few days in untimely form.After visiting by minutes his mother, he must return to the front, where it is understood that he dies.I consider a film against the war since it describes the death, pain and destruction consequences of a war.
The phrase is very insistent in the dialogs of when the war finishes.History is tender, describes the birth of a love that as soon as farmer begins between the young soldier of origin and the girl of the city.As usually it happens in a good film, without giving me account I already put to the plot, doing to me part of the events.I do not want to take leave without commenting that there are three or four scenes that surely the director used David Lean, to make its film, the Dr. Zhivago..
A good half (if not more) of Russian films deal with what Russians term the Great Patriotic War, and yet precious few of them are so profound and universally understood as Grigory Chukhrai's classic.It's a simple story about a young soldier, Alyosha (Vladimir Ivashov), who has just 48 hours of furlough.
Director Chukhrai shows little of the overpoweringly visual virtuosity of Kalatozov's film (except for the superb sequence near the beginning which earns the main character his heroic status) preferring to capture the reality of the scene rather than its emotional core.Even so, BALLAD OF A SOLDIER is a beautifully made film with winning performances from its youthful leads: a 19-year old boy who wins a much-coveted 6-day leave from the front after blowing up two enemy tanks single-handedly and the suspicious waif he befriends (and subsequently falls in love with) on his clandestine train journey.
In this road movie of the different kind you learn a lot about life far away from the front lines, it's about people and their varying struggles during the times of war.
Plus the restored print is as perfect as it can be, making this one a shining gem in every movie-lover's collection.Additional Note: If you've acquired a taste for emotional war drama between the front and back home, there's of course that other Soviet key film you shouldn't miss either.
The story though very simple and common it is told in a most humble way (Just for instance the reason soldier want a break from war to visit his mother is to take care of the leaking roof that she wrote about in a letter), possibly very few movies are this strikingly simple.
For those who haven't yet indulged further, Grigori Chukhrai's 'Ballad of a Soldier' is a good introduction: more universal, less political, not as formally difficult, and quite a bit more fast-moving (demonstrated, quite literally, by sped-up shots of a tank near the beginning!) than most other Soviet fare.In general, the film is a delicate, lyrical story about a young Soviet soldier who goes off to fight the Germans, and then gets just enough leave time to come back to his small village and see his mother.
This return journey takes up most of the film, and along the way our hero meets a girl, falls in love, and sees a variety of characters affected, in different ways, by the war.
Everything is presented in episodes, and the film feels, at times, like it's in chapters.Although the DVD cover and title make 'Ballad of a Soldier' appear to be a war movie, be warned that, really, it's not.
Grigori Chukhrai's Soviet film Ballad of a Soldier begins with a downbeat and downcast voice-over informing us of a situation in which a young boy's mother will never have the chance to have recited to her the rather epic story her fateful son has to tell.
Just as you dread a Soviet era period piece set during The Second World War in which war heroism from the country's youngest and finest is at the very forefront; as the rest of those those poor, equally brave in some sense civilians stay at home and weep for the very soul of the nation; the situation and those on the front, Ballad of a Soldier actually opens up into one of the more interesting coming of age tales I've seen.The young man at the forefront of the piece is a certain private by the name of Alyosha Skvortsov (Ivashov), a boy whose war exploits would indeed make a fine story to tell any mother; friend or friend of a mother in the sense that in the heat of conflict, two Nazi tanks are wiped out by the said young man who has both the reality and responsibility of fighting on the Easatern Front thrust onto him at this early age.
The film is decidedly anti-war, rendering it a soulless and empty experience if a young man's coming of age adventures are explored on the travels he makes inbetween exploits of a combative ilk, and thus gradually informing us that any prior 'dread' we may have had in what to expect from this period Soviet piece, was unnecessary.The film will focus on Alyosha's travels in a minute and careful manner, observing one such instance in which the failure to identify the moment when it is apparently necessary to bribe someone, almost getting caught out and rectifying the situation before applying the said learning later on under different conditions.
The extra burden of a chore is significant in the sense it is an odd job Alyosha is returning home for, and in preoccupying himself with one of someone else, risks the threat being unable to fulfil a duty set by himself - but it's all part of a learning process.If anything, Chukhrai's film victimises the 'little guy', or the poorer and more grounded characters such as Alyosha and those he encounters - it pities them and presents their situation as less than desirable; whereas stately figures such as soldiers and others of various degrees of authority are hard-nosed, seemingly uncompromising and find it rather difficult to understand the true nature of human emotion.
Chukhrai's representation of two classes of people, worlds apart, but bound within the same nation is both sly and inspired.Rather, the film focuses on Alyosha's relationship with a young girl he meets whilst stowing away on a cargo train returning home: she is Shura (Prokhorenko).
Art work at its best 'Ballad of a Soldier' is simple which makes it ever the more powerful causing the mind wonder how many times we've ridden on that same train as Pvt. Alyosha Skvortsov and Shura....
Showcases the Passion and Grim Realities of War. This film essentially begins with a young soldier named "Private Alyosha Skvortsov" (Vladimir Ivashov) leaving his mother and the small village he was raised in to defend his country from the invading German army during World War 2.
This 1959 war film movie directed by Grigori Chukhrai, proves them, wrong, big time with its gripping story about love!
It recounts, within the context of the turmoil of war, various kinds of love: the romantic love of a young couple, the committed love of a married couple, and a mother's love of her child, as a Red Army soldier named Pvt. Alyosha Skvortsov (Volodya Ivashov) tries to make it home during a leave, after being rewarded for taking out two German tanks.
The announcement at the start of the film that Alyosha is dead makes his experiences all the more impactful, knowing that he will never return home again, and assuming that he may never see his love Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko) after he leaves her.Alyosha is an idealization of what many Russian soldiers were: Young, and willing to give anything for their country.
And the heroes are heroic because of who they are as people, not what they've done for the cause.In this movie the casualties of war are the families forced to leave their homes, the wife unfaithful to her deployed husband, the almost soul-mates separated by a train that has to leave on time and the mother who has to see her son for the last time.
Ballad of a Soldier is about Aloysha, a young private in the Soviet army that is granted some time to go visit with his mother.
The movie follows the people that he meets on his journey home, even falling in love on the way.
He travels across the countryside, meets various people, and falls in love with Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko), a young woman whom he meets on a train.One of the interesting things about this movie is that it starts by telling the audience that Alyosha got killed in WWII.
A common theme of Thaw films, especially those about World War II like the Ballad or Kalatozov's The Cranes are Flying was the lack of communication between soldiers leaving for the front and the people who they loved who stayed behind.
The 1959 Soviet film entitled "Ballad of a Soldier," directed by Grigori Chukhrai is set during World War ll.
The Ballad of a soldier is a Russian movie that revolves around World War 2 and is about a young couple who are madly in love.
In Germany and the Netherlands the film Ballad of a soldier is one of the most celebrated Soviet war stories.