Sluchay s Polyninym

The time is the winter of 1941 and the scenario a Soviet air base near Murmansk. British pilots are around; a wing of the RAF, fresh from success in the Battle of Britain is in operation since September. The wing's mission: to escort Allied convoys to Murmansk in their last leg around the top of Nazi-occupied Norway, subject to attack from Luftwaffe bases. News from the front are largely suppressed although everybody knows the situation is grim. The only point of light seems to be the November full dress parade commemorating the Bolshevik Revolution held in Red Square in defiance of the Nazis during the battle of Moscow, the front only a few kilometers West.

Nikolay Polynin, the commander of the base has been injured and is temporarily laid out. He gets acquainted with Galina, a Moscow actress assigned to a theater troupe touring the front to entertain officers and soldiers. They fall in love, and the rest of the movie is on the ups and downs of their romance, complicated by Polynin's assignment to the Moscow region. The script, cowritten by novelist Konstantin Simonov is witty and mature; characters are sculpted with deft touches and clichés and flag waving are absent. Moral judgments, if any, are left to the viewer and the story is nowhere romanticized or artificially sweetened. There are some intriguing observations (in-jokes?) about the 1941 movie Suvorov, another morale raiser of the time. Direction by Aleksey Sakharov (also cowriter) moves the story along a good pace and the movie is never boring; acting is first rate.

As a movie about war and romance during WW2, this is surprising in a way. I find no fault with the acting and how the movie is shot. From that point of view, it is good and even more than that. But one must ask the question, what is the whole point of this story? Is it to show how people's feelings are affected by war and uncertainty? Or how love wins in the end? This is open to interpretation. I enjoyed watching this film, all the time waiting for something decisive to happen. Yet, little happened. The film ends with a question mark. As a film about the uncertainty of emotion it is a success. But that is nothing new, indeed a very old and unsurprising theme. One wonders what is the basic purpose here. But as mentioned earlier the acting is good and convincing.