|
Description:
A heroic drama, based upon the title novel by Yuri Bondarev (novels “Quiet”, “The Shore”, “The Choice”, novella “Battalions Ask for Fire”).
The film recounts the story of one battle of the Great Patriotic War, the battle on the Volga. The authors focus their attention on the fate of Soviet soldiers and officers in just one battery, who, at the price of heroic efforts and their own lives, did not let the enemy tanks through.
Unlike the plaster, headquarters-centered description of war in the 1940s and the lyrical-romantic one in the 1960s, the war in this film had again become a people’s war, with the onscreen appearance of field wives, needless deaths, kitchens lagging behind, frostbitten scouts, vodka rations, funeral teams and such shame as Vlasov’s 2nd Shock Army, in which fought and was reported missing the son of General Bessonov, perhaps the most convincing army commander of the Soviet screen, superbly portrayed by Georgy Zhzhyonov.
...And staying in our memory forever will be his terse, from overflowing emotions, phrase: "I wish I could do more", and the scene when the seven surviving men, all that remained of the regiment, crowded, frozen, in a shell-dug crater, cried and drank their vodka ration to the newly-won decorations.
|