gest1969

I came upon this documentary by accident, checking the "Vietnam War" films on Netflix. It moved me beyond words, it's a discreet little gem of a film, a bittersweet and even funny in its absurdity tale that touches upon many things, life and war, music and bombs, youth and old age, innocence and disillusionment, men and women, civilians and soldiers, whites and blacks, then and now. These elderly Italian ladies, these small town music teachers, may seem like they don't have much of a story to tell but trust me, you don't want to miss it!

I am a Cold War child, born in a country which did have common borders with a Warsaw Pact member but was never a target of thermonuclear destruction. I was still at primary school when I came across a couple of serialized excerpts from Powers' memoir. He really caught my imagination. I saw "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" and "Across the Bridge" (with Rod Steiger), films in which the bridge is both the passage and the frontier, a no-man's land in which destinies can be decided in a split second of hesitation or bad luck.

Bridge of Spies was a great disappointment. Cars and costumes were fine but the spirit and the people of the era was absent. I don't understand why, when I think of "Munich" or "Schindler's List", when there are so many novels to consult for the atmosphere and so many memoirs to consult for the facts. Why was Powers pictured with such unkind shallowness? Why were CIA men and DDR functionaries such caricatures? No matter how great Mark Rylance was, where was the motivation and the ideology of the Soviet spy? Where were the political leaders of the two superpowers? How did the little lawyer from the Bronx become such a cool operative behind the lines, from one day to the other, without experiencing any fear or trepidation?

There is nothing wrong with high morals or nostalgia in cinema but when a film tries to portray an episode from a complex political and ideological conflict serving only these ingredients, then I can only be disappointed at the waste of means and opportunities. Pity.

I believe that war films should try to convey the terror of war, avoid idealism and respect some rudimentary military principles. Zvezda barely does the first. Zvezda being a Russian war film, I was expecting patriotism, sentimentality, beautiful poetic pictures, a lush score, Slavic cheekbones and cruel Germans. What I didn't need was the naive love non-affair, the unrealistically silly war scenes and the abuse of the syrupy soundtrack in a film which avoided carefully all historical or political references (Stalinism, Nazism, Holocaust) only to end on a passing but nonetheless insulting to our sense of history endnote about "liberating Poland". A missed opportunity as a film but not as propaganda apparently.