What's good for a German?

" Stalingrad" by Fyodor Bondarchuk is released

A win-win solution is to tell “Stalingrad” as a fairy tale: any claims to realism would be ridiculous

Let's start with the main thing: Stalingrad is a good film. It’s not a masterpiece, but nothing like that has ever been seen in post-Soviet commercial cinema. But it is much more meaningful, brighter, more exciting than “ The Ninth Company” and “ Inhabited Island” by the same Fyodor Bondarchuk . There is a lot of beauty here, but fortunately there is little beauty. There is pathos, but no leavened patriotism. And this is much more important than whether the film will collect its millions ( quite likely) and whether it will receive ( an Oscar hardly ).

Fyodor Bondarchuk is not Sergei Bondarchuk . Those who gloatingly remind about this have forgotten that the world in which Bondarchuk Sr. filmed “ The Fate of a Man” and “ They Fought for the Motherland” for an audience of millions was different. That director masterfully mastered the Soviet image system and participated in its creation - unlike, say, its patented destroyer Alexei German Sr. Today that system does not exist, and no one has created a new one. Hence the disappointing box office failures of new war films, from Burnt by the Sun 2 to The White Tiger. But the Great Patriotic War is the main “ spiritual bond” in the Russian Federation, and the Battle of Stalingrad is its very heart. So the task before Bondarchuk Jr. was more difficult than before his father or mentor Yuri Ozerov ( Bondarchuk Jr. played in his “ Stalingrad” in 1989).

A win-win solution is to tell Stalingrad as a fairy tale: after all, any claims to realism, and even in the form of a blockbuster, would be ridiculous. For this purpose, a plot “ frame” was introduced, one of the main discoveries of the generally boring script: the film begins and ends in Fukushima, where, during an earthquake, an elderly military serviceman consoles a German woman trapped in the rubble with stories about his mother and the “ five fathers” - the soldiers who protected her in Stalingrad. So, before us is the myth of Bethlehem and the Immaculate Conception. It is not for nothing that in the very first frames the soldiers walk on water as if on dry land, and then with living torches - like the warriors of the Apocalypse - they take the German outpost by storm. Burning alive - you will be resurrected, crawling through the mud - you will be cleansed ( in the finale, like a symbolic baptism, there is a scene of an improbable ablution in a bathtub taken from the ruins). In this reverse world, even the snow is black - the action takes place before the cold weather, in November 1942, and ash is falling from the sky - and in the lightning sparkling behind the clouds, it is not difficult to see a guiding star.

Through the efforts of cinematographer Maxim Osadchy and a team of production designers, the film inevitably plunges into a swamp of dense symbolism. Everything stays afloat only due to the inventive and effective 3D ( it’s not for nothing that this is the first Russian film to be released in IMAX ; the visuals here are at the Hollywood level): it “ grounds” the image, giving it tangibility and objectivity. The first victims are the actors. The ensemble of five defenders of the House ( , gets to play something at least partly expressive with a capital letter, as otherwise) is chosen cleverly, but only the commander-manager, the eternally bitter hero Pyotr Fedorov . Maria Smolnikova is in a slightly more advantageous position: she is at least the only girl in a crowd of men, an orphan miraculously lingering in a destroyed building. But she, as one of the characters constantly says, “ in general” has to play Russia. No longer the majestic “ Motherland”, but a kind of “ Sister Motherland”, in the same gray scarf and with the same piercing gaze.

However, the film also has a second storyline that saves the first, and at the same time the entire enterprise. This is the story of Captain Kahn, who missed that very House, and is now obsessed with the idea of capturing it again. In fact, “ Stalingrad” is the odyssey of this shabby man with nerves of steel, who fell into the country of symbols, Russia, as if into a trap: he fell victim to her spell without realizing it ( Kan falls in love with a Russian blonde, who is like two peas in a pod like his dead wife ). One hundred percent German, rationalist and pragmatist, this Wehrmacht knight is trying to understand the logic of an absurd confrontation, the outcome of which seems to be predetermined, but he cannot. He is Thomas the Unbeliever, placed by fate itself on the side of evil and gradually realizing this. He is a distant relative of Lieutenant Brusentsov from “ Two Comrades Served,” whom we always felt so sorry for, even though he killed innocent Red Army soldiers. And most importantly: he, the enemy at the gate, is the agent of each of us. Whether we like it or not, we look at the mythical world of Stalingrad through his eyes.

The reason for this is the amazing skill of the German actor Thomas Kretschmann, who played the main role in the German film with the same name twenty years ago: apparently, over these years he has accumulated such internal energy and strength that he easily outplayed all the Russians ( not Oscar , so “ Niku" with the " Golden Eagle" we definitely owe him for this). And this is also the high, by no means decorative humanism of the picture, which equalizes opponents in the face of death, and likens war to an earthquake.

From October 10 in city cinemas

Published at: www.vedomosti.ru/friday/article/2013/10/04/32991