Fantassins, seuls en première ligne

There are several aspects to this film which need to be viewed before the films itself is viewed. Otherwise you might not get what you are expecting, and might do a great deal of suffering. The film itself is structurally confusing, as if two different teams had been working on two different films, without being allowed to know what the other unit is doing. It takes off as a light hearted historical romance: you get the obligatory glitter of the Sun King's court, lovely and corrupt noblemen and -women, dispute at cards, a lady throwing in her valuable necklace, fake letters being fabricated by ill-wishing, jealous courtesans, gentlemen dueling and the King, desiring the lady in question for himself, reprimanding them by sending them as emissaries to two courts which are at war, i.e. most certainly to their death.

From that point on the other unit takes over: we get a brutal, realistic battle picture with nothing much more than the combat and brutality of early XVIII century warfare. Then, occasionally, the "romance"-team steps in, introducing the rather lame remnants of the romantic involvement left back in France, as the heroine decides to embark on the perilous journey to be re-united with her lover (actually, as far as we know, they only had some casual sex one night during which the chevalier didn't even remove his wig).

Overall, the picture suffers from this structural inhomogeneity. I saw ladies who had been lured to see the film as a historical romance, get up and walk as it became clear that the romantic part is superficial and lame and the military part is bloody and unromantic. Even though there's a lot of glamour, the scenes depend too heavily upon familiar clichés which were introduced by Hollywood about two generations ago.

The battle scenes are extremely well done. The recreation of brutally ineffective, senselessly life-squandering warfare is absolutely top notch. If you are interested in war films, this is as good as it gets. As it is very realistic, don't expect much pathos or heroic fun: it's dirty and stupid as any war is. You get beautiful women raped, shot and hanged, and hundreds of handsome youth being turned into cannon fodder. The positive - and surprising - thing is, that even though it's a Russian film, the Russians aren't necessarily the heroes. They have wronged the Poles, so these fraternize with the Swedes, who in turn afflict misery upon Ukrainians and others who are supposed to be the enemies. Czar Peter the Great is a universal Russian hero, and to see him sending a girl to the gallows (a girl, whose whole family has been butchered by the Russians and who only has lived for rightful revenge) is something that has never before been done in Russian cinema.

Also rather unique is the fact that the dialog is in authentic languages: first in French, then in Polish, then Swedish and then Russian (and Ukrainian). The cast is 100 % Russian, who have memorized the lines in according languages (phonetically in most cases, it seems), and then the dialog has been dubbed - also by Russians! The results are mixed. French sounds adequate, as does Polish. Unfortunately there haven't been any Swedish-speakers around, so this part of the film is utterly ridiculous: even the word "Sverige" (Sweden) is pronounced totally wrong! To cover up the outcome, these scenes aren't provided with subtitles, but instead we get a monotonic Russian voice translating the dialog. This distracts from the action quite a lot and is very much to be blamed for the ineffectiveness of these sequences. As this big budget project has obviously taken a huge amount of money, I wonder why they have allowed that minor obstacle to virtually ruin a lot of the film's otherwise pristine historical accuracy.

I would have to state that this is a man's picture. You don't get the emotional depth, but you get a lot of very pretty girls (Ksenya Knyazeva is so superbly beautiful that for many viewers her presence on the screen is quite worthy of the ticket price). Then you get the very strong motive of friendship between two very different men, whose love-hate relationship carries much of the tension in the film. Most of the actors are good, even though it's not very comfortable to mouth your way through the scenes without understanding yourself. The lighting and camera-work, as well as the art direction is first class and makes the film watchable even when you don't believe what you see. Great pains have been taken to recreate the period, and the results are very good indeed. I am not sure what factors are responsible for the film not really clicking - probably a mixed bag of different undermining frivolities, such as listed above.

Worthy of a look for those interested in battle scenes and historical accuracy. To be avoided by those who look forward to either a fun epic spectacle, tantalizing love romance or deep Award winning drama.

Needless to say, this Servant of Two Masters is not based on the play by Carlo Goldoni.

...though not without flaws.

The main flaw was the plot, which sometimes seemed a bit contrived and incoherent, in particular the love story plot line. There were some clichés that could have been avoided or at least played differently, but once I got used to the fact that the whole thing was a sort of Three Musketeers meets Saving Private Ryan genre mash, that didn't bother me too much.

What starts out as a depiction of the splendor and pomp of Versailles under the Sun King eventually becomes a fairly brutal war story where several competing groups face each other, more accurately depicting the sometimes chaotic situation on the Russo-Polish borderlands during much of the late 17yh to early 18th century. Seemingly sympathetic characters are killed almost as an afterthought, and witnessing the differing reactions of the two protagonists - one French, the other Russian - brings home the differences in culture and outlook between them.

Kudos to the Russian film industry for their efforts towards historical correctness at least in props and settings, and for making the different characters speak different languages. Not knowing too much French, I cannot judge the pronunciation of the French lines spoken in the movie. Being Norwegian, and knowing a thing or two about the language spoken on the other side of the border to the east, I can say something about the Swedish lines spoken. In short, they ranged from obviously foreign (particularly on the part of the Swedish doctors) to what sounded seamlessly native. Since the Swedish army did incorporate a lot of foreigners, I didn't find that particularly odd. In any case, I've rarely seen a Hollywood movie do the same, it seems that making someone speak English with a funny accent is about as far as they are willing to go in the language department, at least up to fairly recently.

All in all a solid piece of production with a few rough edges. I'd like to see more Russian historical films, since there is a lot of interesting (and action-packed) history there to be made films of.

I normally.dont review a movie but this horrible movie makes me to do it because Russians mocks all nations in this movie. Decent battle scenes from Youtube makes me watch whole movie. Poles are portrayed as alcoholics and primitive villagers,Swedes like some evil psychos who want to just destroy everything and French as arrogant snobs. Only Germans are portrayed as decent people what is not bad but how they mock everyone else is ridiculous. Russians are portrayed just as victims who has wisdom and are above the things,brave and.rightful. No matter of historical context of this war. Costumes,camera angles and other technical things are right for me but I feel some bighead thinking in this movie. Battle scenes are well made except that thing they made Swedes looks like cowards sometimes. Battle scenes arent historically accurate but fit well for the movie. So battles,visuals and plot are cool anything else makes me angry so 3 points.

First of all, the battle of Poltava is very far from the center of this movie, so the international title is very misleading. Second, the story sucked. Big-time. Two french noble mens, one on the Russian side and one on the Swedish side, just for them to meet and settle at the end? Ridiculous.

All the foreign characters are played by Russian actors, and the foreign language is done by voice over, which is done really bad by the way.

The clothing is historical incorrect, with the officers on both sides looking like the Napoleonic offers during Waterloo. I guess Oleg Ryaskov got some inspiration from Sergei Bondarchuk's Waterloo. Except there is more than 100 years apart from these two battles. And for example, the Swedish attack wasn't lead by Karl XII (because he was wounded and couldn't lead Sweden in battle), it was lead by Carl Gustaf Rehnskiöld. I could go on and on about historical incorrectness.

The sound effects are the same throughout the movie. There is this exact same sound every time someone stabs another, and the guns all sound the same.

This is not a movie worth watching in my opinion.

Anyone who has enjoyed the "Sharpe" series would probably enjoy this film. It is a fairly well done period piece with lots of action and a modern directorial and editing style. The film, however, lacks any meaningful character development and the movie suffers as a result. If the film was a bit longer perhaps this problem could have been remedied. I suspect a lot of the film was cut to get it under a 2 hour running time. The production values are good and the battle sequence at the end is well done. Unfortunately, the DVD I obtained (the international version) was not well done. The picture is letterboxed and not anamorphic and there are visible compression artifacts through the entire film. This is a real shame as it appears a good deal of work was put into composing and lighting many of the shots and all of this work cannot be fully appreciated with the poor video quality.