The Russian WWII drama has its moments, but ultimately gets lost in vagaries. Read our full review:
without describing something that happens in the first 20 minutes. Revealing it outright would be saying too much. Perhaps it’s best, then, that the incident comes early in the movie. What ultimately matters, more than the act itself, are the traumas at its root—to say nothing of the future traumas that it portends.is set in the war-ravished Leningrad of 1945. It focuses on two women, Iya and Masha , who were anti-aircraft gunners together in the war.
Masha, meanwhile, remains at war, making her way to Berlin. She has a husband, who’s killed, and a son named Pashka, a boy born on the front lines, who’s malnourished and very much bears the marks of war. Pashka gets sent back to Leningrad to stay in Iya’s care until Masha returns home. The film opens just before she returns.is bleak. That isn’t a warning, really; there’s just no other way to put it.
The sick amber of the film’s lighting, the ways that it both brightens Leningrad at night and heightens our sense of the city’s silent, uneasy shell-shock, is a case in point—a good example of the waysfolds this idea into its very design. Another example is Iya’s condition. Though they’re attributed to head trauma, Ilya’s spells are no doubt psychological, too, at least in the way that the film deals them out, cuing them with unspecified triggers that nevertheless feel like triggers.
Symbols are a powerful narrative tool for a director, and so are ellipses. Balagov ambitiously tries his hand at both, here, to mixed results. His filmmaking is tactile and sensitive: long hand-held shots that dwell in scenes and find astute ways to frame the bodies and faces, thus the emotions, of his characters. You wouldn’t be able to guess that its two stars are both making their film debuts here, and that’s at least in part because Balagov films them so attentively.
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