'Ballad of a Soldier' dir. Grigory Chukhrai, 1959.
To be honest, I spent most of this movie just waiting for something bad to happen to the main character Alyosha, just because of the foreboding opening shot. We are told at the beginning that he "never made it home from the war", so I assumed that he was not going to make it home for leave. When the train got attacked (bombed, perhaps?) I was like OK, I bet this is it. That sucks, to get so close and get killed. I thought he would be shown doing something heroic - saving the Ukranian kids - and then he would die as a result of the accident. But he didn't! He made it all the way home but just for a few minutes. Then he couldn;t find his mom, and I thought aw man, she's gonna miss him by like 30 seconds, that sucks! And then she didn't! But you only get to see him for like 3 minutes, that really does suck! So it was a happy, yet sad ending since he did get home, but he had to leave right away.
One thing I didn't get was that everyone seemed to be really respectful of him as a soldier and are willing to help him out and everything, EXCEPT for the scene of the morning after the trainwreck. Then they were all like, get out of our way, you're not good for anything! And that threw me off. The people right around where he lived were more like that to him, and that seemed backwards to me since hose people were more likely to know him personally. It wasn't like, oh hey Alyosha! It was, go away!
I'm not feeling the best today, so this might end up being a bit short. I might come back to it a little later and add something more.
Honestly I was too, I was waiting for something bad to happen to him or for him to die. I know thats probably bad, but the opening shot did imply that. We just didn't know whether we would see it or not, which we obviously didn't.
ReplyDeleteOK, I have to confess that sometimes I wonder whether he really does end up going home or not. Here's what I mean: it looks so *certain* at the beginning that he is going to be blown away by that tank--and the camera even does the whole upside down thing which makes me wonder if we're now entering either an imaginary (or simply hypothetical) universe. And then the rest of the film almost at times feels like the wistful feel of a spirit fleeing home...one who still feels life and is attached to everything about it (wishes to marry, for example) but who now can't. More than a few wartime mothers have sworn they saw flashing glimpses of their sons on the very day they died in battle. And ballads sometimes consist of a dead man visiting his lover one last time...
ReplyDeletePerhaps there's nothing to all of this--and it is obviously more likely that Alyosha actually makes it home, albeit for just a few moments--but still, the wistful, almost dreamlike quality of it all sometimes makes me wonder...
I wonder if the way Alyosha was treated after the bombing of the train was because A) they wanted to blame him since he was there and they still were attacked. B) this was to show how soldiers would have been treated when they got back from war if any had been alive.
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