Stalingrad
Directed by Fedor Bondarchuk. 131 minutes. DVD, May 13. Russian and German; English subtitles. $30.99.
The first Russian IMAX feature to hit American screens is the kind of war movie Americans know and usually love, and in 3D—our current favorite visual punch. (It’s refreshingly CGI-free, though; its sets were actually built.) The sense of familiarity is subliminally enhanced by a spot-on score from Angelo Badalamenti (Twin Peaks, Blue Velvet). Here, it had a one-week run in IMAX theaters nationwide and barely missed an Oscar nomination; at home, six weeks after its release, it became the highest-grossing film in Russian history.
So let’s get it straight from the jump. Stalingrad is not a historical analysis or overview, nor is every prop accurate. It’s a genre flick—part melodrama, part history, mixed with a consistently intelligent and deft hand. Think of it as Band of Brothers, Russian style. And it works.
The narrator is the son of a woman who spent her girlhood surviving Stalingrad’s brutal ravages. “I have five fathers,” he says, by way of opening. As Stalingrad unfolds in vignettes probing the gritty, unsavory reality of a city reduced to ruins and the constant, nerve-shredding maneuvering to kill and avoid being killed, it gradually reveals what that sentence means. Technically dazzling, emotionally shrewd, and exquisitely paced, the film draws you into the tensions and releases that grip a handful of characters, Russian and German, with symbolic overtones.
Five Russian soldiers—a classic war-movie mix ranging from shrewd lieutenant to kindly big guy to wet-behind-the-ears kid—have managed to cross the Volga River alive, part of the Red Army’s decision to insert just enough troops into Stalingrad to stall the Wehrmacht while orchestrating a massive encirclement. They find their mission impossible, so they hole up in a battered house barely clinging, like them, to the river’s western banks. There they discover a thin, almost affectless girl who refuses to leave. They cajole, threaten, plead: she’s in the way, she’ll get killed, she’ll get them killed. But her quiet refusals attract and energize them even as they’re puzzled or angered; inevitably each soldier, over time, falls in love with her in his own way, and she, in turn, falls in love with them. She tends them, sews on their buttons, even fights alongside them as they fend off endless attacks—and, above all, makes the men feel, for all-too-fleeting moments, human in the midst of daily horror.
Cut across the battle line—which, in Stalingrad, is practically across what’s left of the street. A German lieutenant brings milk and food and goodies to a Russian girl who reminds him of his dead lover. She seems unwilling but passive, at least at first; she puts up with him for the stuff he drops off so proudly, which she mostly gives away. But her neighbors, trapped with her in a cramped basement, despise her nonetheless. Almost against her will, she is drawn deeper into the strange, semi-fantasy relationship her German lover so single-mindedly desires.
And so it goes from there. Some of it you’d probably expect. But the true gift of genre movies comes when they’re better than they have to be, and Stalingrad is—far better. The actors and script give the characters real heft and nuance. The plot turns resonate against the larger background without becoming predictably trapped within it. The direction moves adroitly from subtle to full-frontal attack, enhanced and sharpened by ingenious use of IMAX 3D. The skirmish scenes especially are ingeniously choreographed. Now that Stalingrad has been released on DVD, it’s well worth watching even without the high-tech big screen—if only to rediscover how what most folks think and do during wartime, regardless of which side they’re on, remains fundamentally human.
Originally published in the August 2014 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.
