It was magnificent, though part of my reaction might be to the novelty of film-making in a style so masterful and confident and yet so unfamiliar. I had a similar reaction to Grigori Kozintsev's King Lear. Like that film's Cordelia, Valentina Shendrikova, the female lead in this movie, Tatiana Samoilova, seems radiant almost beyond belief, but this is movie is much more about her than King Lear is about Cordelia, and her acting is the central feature of the film. I found it one of the most compelling performances I've ever seen. The combination of the story, her acting, and her beauty--a good deal of which is a creation of the camera work--is quite something. The camera work throughout the movie vies with her performance for being the the film's central feature. I was struck by the idea that in the Soviet Union something this artistic could have such a budget behind it. The crowd scenes are something else. (in the U.S., if the most artistic director available were given such a budget--and of course he, whoever he is at that moment, not infrequently is--the result would probably be much less disciplined.) The bad guy seems a little too bad for realism, and the scene in which he rapes the heroine is stagey (although always rich from the craft point of view); the war, and the soldiers fighting it, are presented more positively and patriotically than the complex reality would justify. But overall the movie does not overly simplify reality; on the contrary. Serious and successful examples of the tragic genre expand one's reality.
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