Le Destin d'un homme

a Sholokhov adaptation. powerful and honest. a Bondarchuk gem. and map of a war. it is a great Soviet film. not only as artistic work or testimony about elements of a period. not as sign of post Stalin evolution of art. but for silence of images. for the message after decades to its viewer. because the fate of man is, in fact, the fate of East Europe in last period of XX century. sufferance, pain and death. and delicate hope as freedom space. love as only gun against cruelty of a time. camps as metaphor for Nazi and Soviet system. fear, struggle for survive, guilty because innocence is only fiction. and sense of life, again and again, as fruit of battle against yourself. a film about life. pure life. without exception or pink ingredients. cold, bitter, strange but beautiful. if you discover force to remain yourself in middle of each storm.

This immensely powerful film represents the directorial debut of Sergey Bondarchuk who also takes the main role of Andrey Sokolov. It is based upon a short story by Mikhail Sholokhov who received a Nobel Prize under Krushchev and became a hardliner under Brezhnev. Already evident here is Bondarchuk's astonishing sense of the visual and his skill with actors. As with subsequent films he does have a tendency to 'overcook it' but that is a minor criticism. The film is aided by Venyamin Basner's marvellous score and great camerawork by Vladimir Monakhov. Zanaida Kirienko is as touching here as she is in 'Quiet flows the Don' and there is a chilling performance by Juli Averin as a German Kommandment. A highlight of the film is when he spares Sokolov's life because of the latter's capacity for drinking large amounts of vodka on an empty stomach! Excellent scene. Sokolov loses so much in the course of the film but gains 'compensation' at the end. Bondarchuk is excellent in the role. It is difficult to find a sub-titled version of this but the story is so gripping and the film so visually impressive that somehow it doesn't seem to matter. Fully deserving of the Grand Prize at the 1st Moscow International Film Festival which also honoured Bondarchuk six years later for his monumental 'War and Peace'.

This first directorial effort from actor Bondarchuk (mainly known for his monumental War and Peace) shouldn't have starred the director. His ruddy countenance didn't convince me one bit he suffered through all the mishaps in his life during the Great War. Furthermore I found it very hard to believe the Germans went to so much effort to save the lives of these Untermenschen. There were good performances though and it is shot beautifully.

Watch instead Come and See (Idi i Smotri) for a shattering experience of the Great War.

Sergei Bondarchuk directs the film and plays the lead himself. Thus he dominates the entire film from beginning to the end, and although he is a most qualified actor and director, you lack the smallest shade of polyphony. The story is by Mikhail Sholokhov, the main Soviet nationalist, and his tendencies to glorify Soviet Russia shines through especially in his treatment of the Germans, who are all abominable stereotypes - with the exception of one drunkard and the final general. There is not a shred of the slightest sense of humour in the film and almost no smiles even, except in the last moment when the boy comes in and and lets in some well needed and most comforting sunshine. Thus the dreadful story ends with the victory of humanity. It's a masterpiece, of course, but the whole film is a slow and depressing ordeal.

Sergey Bondarchuk is probably best known for his epic spectacle "War and Peace" (1966), and his outstanding feature debut "The Destiny of Man" (1959) was made in the same tradition of the war genre, though not in a similarly big fashion. Like many other Soviet war films made during the cultural thaw in Eastern Europe caused by the spirit of Geneva such as "The Cranes Are Flying" (1957) and "Ballad of a Soldier" (1959), "The Destiny of Man" focuses on the human experience in the bleak misery of war. It tells the story of an ordinary man who lost everything during a war that meant nothing to him.

The historical legacy and the poignantly present memory of the Second World War played an integral role in almost all of the Soviet films made during the cultural thaw. It is as though life itself was approached from this perspective. An entire generation was left alone with their problems to sink into oblivion in the era of Stalin's cult of personality. Not until the new political waves of the 1950's arrived were these people dealt properly in cinema.

"The Destiny of Man" cuts right to the memory of WWII as it begins from the first spring after the war. A man recalls his experiences during the war and ponders why life has mistreated him so in a long flashback. Bondarchuk's mobile camera fluently shifts to the past -- the memory -- revealing its reality before our eyes. His style is very modern, as is the case with other films from this period, born from dynamic movement, montage and intensity of close-ups. Accompanied by an astonishing soundtrack with nearly surreal tones and a great score by Venyamin Basner, this poetic voyage to the days gone by touches our very core.

The film was made in the same year with Masaki Kobayashi's masterful trilogy "The Human Condition" (1959-1962) which also highlights the experience and moral disappointment of an individual in times of immeasurable brutality. "The Destiny of Man" also includes a sequence taking place in a POW camp where the prisoners are forced to work, thus inevitably triggering an association with the first part of Kobayashi's trilogy. A perceptive spectator (or an obsessive fan of Kobayashi) might even observe a shot bearing a striking resemblance to the iconic image of workers walking up the hill.

What makes "The Destiny of Man" to stand the test of time and lifts it up to the same level with "The Cranes Are Flying" and "Ballad of a Soldier" is its profoundness. It is not a profoundness achieved simply by story, but by form. This can be seen in the film's aesthetics which is tremendously rich of tone and meaning. Bondarchuk truly achieves to depict the complexity of human experience and historical conditions. The cinematic repertoire of the image, the scenes and even entire sequences extends from the brief vibrations of the dramatic surface to the aesthetic profoundness of human existence.