Vingt jours sans guerre

"Twenty Days without War" is one of the very few "cinema-verite" style films made on the topic of World War II, specifically the Soviet home front. Based on the life of famous war correspondent and poet Konstantin Simonov (who himself narrates off-screen at the opening and closing sequences), this remarkable film follows the venerable Yuri Nikulin, playing a Simonov-like character who is granted a 20-day leave to visit the Uzbek city of Tashkent (one of the major evacuation centers during the war, where the Soviet cinema studios were moved). Part of his journey's purpose is to advise the filming of a propagandistic screen version of one of his stories. Many of the sequences here are shot almost documentary-style, with such unpretentiousness and candor, as if the real war participants and victims were actually interviewed on screen. And yet, lyrical and even poetic moments are also glimpsed, albeit in amazingly unforced, unsentimental fashion. Most of the actors, including Nikulin himself, lived through or fought in the war, and their intention, as well as the director's must have been to deliver a hitherto-unknown, "you are there" immediacy to the audience. They splendidly succeed, as the film, like no other of its kind, brings to life the reminiscences of my grandparents, who experienced both the fighting and the evacuation. In fact, it remains my grandmother's all-time favorite war film because of the honesty of its emotions and the truthful spirit of the period it conveys.

A veteran Soviet Army major, on a three-week furlough from the 1943 winter offensive, discovers how even the false peace of a remote civilian village can be disturbed by the silent echoes of distant battle. His home in Tashkent is a long way from the smoke and gunfire of the Western Front, but during his leave Major Lopatin sees another, no less emotional war being waged there. He finds it in the bereaved cries of a new widow and in the lies he tells another, urging her to wait for a message that will never arrive; he encounters it in the comically inaccurate film being staged from his published memoirs of the Stalingrad siege; and he tries to escape it for a few, all too brief moments with an attractive seamstress and single mother, abandoned by her wayward husband. Displaying remarkable empathy for his characters and setting, director Alexei Gherman has made a quietly stunning film about an uncommon aspect of modern warfare, intimate in mood and detail despite the expansive clarity of its wide-screen black and white imagery.