"Release" Date: 1967
After making the movie, Askoldov lost his job, was expelled from the Communist Party, exiled from Moscow, and banned from working on feature films for life. His survival shows us the nature of the post-thaw period. The film was shelved for twenty years. Upon its unveiling in the late 1980s, it won multiple awards.
The plot of the film is focused on a female commissar, Klavdia Vavilova, in the Red Army during the Civil War. We meet her when she discovers a deserter; she is a hardened, experienced military leader. She's pregnant and is forced to stay with the family of a poor Jewish blacksmith. At first, the family and Vavilova are not happy living together, but they soon grow to become friends. Once her baby is born, Vavilova embraces civilian life. BUT, the frontline advances closer to the town. Vavilova attempts to console the fearful Jewish family with a Communist dream ("One day people will work in peace and harmony"), but her propaganda is interrupted with a vision of the fate of the Jews in WWII. She rushes to the front to rejoin her army regiment, leaving her child behind with the family.
The Jewish blacksmith, Yefim, danced and sang his fears of poverty and death away. He continually calls Vavilova a "Russian," considering himself an outsider in the very country he inhabits. His fears of being an outsider are hardened when his children commit was he compares to a pogrom to their older sister.
I found this film oddly harsh. I think it was mostly the sound that affected my opinion in that way. The camera angles were also remarkably sharp, and with the sound created a film that was not easy or enjoyable to watch. I often found myself looking away, in the way that happens with thrillers and the like, so that I wouldn't have to be a part of what was happening on the screen.
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