The Buffalo News from Buffalo, New York • 72

REVIEW: MOVIE A harrowing Russian masterpiece By JE SIMON News Critic OME AND is as harrowing and horrify ing a war film as ever seen It may well be a master piece in fact And yet it opens today in the University Theater weirdly unher alded at least unheralded in rela tion to the sweeping sometimes hal lucinatory experience of seeing it Its director Elem Klimov and the latter not yet widely distributed in the West) was recently elected to the head of the Soviet ilmmakers union The inner politics of Soviet culture are usually among the gray est and most profound subjects known to civilization But Klimov's surprise election is said to signal a radical warming change in the kind of films that will be now made in Russia and those that will make their way to the West I believe it and is iong (2 hours) ultimately unre I mltting in its impact and magnlfi cence The print of it showing now in the University Theater is far from impeccable but a film that ought to be seen by anyone even remotely serious about movies The innocent title masks an epic of horrors set in Byelorussia a Rus Esian republic In 1943 And yet thedeceptive title is understandable The film is about lor a young teen age boy (played by Alexei Kravchenko) who leaves his dis I fraught mother and lovely twin sis ters in a tiny village to go off the war firsthand as if it were the ultimate adventure A friend of his helps him dig out a rifle from a Nazi grave lor packs a suitcase and ready A quick beating by a brutish soldier begins to acquaint him with to come lor is at first so delighted to be in the war that he gleefully ac cepts extra duty He gets involved in a nascent sexless romance with a lissome blond girl who is almost equally unaware of the horrors that swirl around them (played by an extremely lovely Russian actress named Olga Mironova) Klimov is an immensely talented director Anyone calling him a mas ter will get no argument from me His style is obsessive and absolutely mesmerizing full of tracking cameras and immense closeups that virtually envelop the whole screen a huge epic style that connects directly with the greatest of epic I filmmakers: Kurosawa say and 1 even Griffith The film slowly and spaciously turns into a juggernaut of horrorsIt takes its sweet time going where going but jolted continu ously along the way and in absolutely no doubt when you get there The young people are told to stay behind by the ragtag Russian army troop They have a near surreal I idyll in the forest as if living in a naively savage painting by Henri Rousseau And then in a truly stun ning scene the forest around them is bombed The bombing is completely un like such things in commercial American films There is true terror to it the terror of noise and confu sion and the earth itself seeming to be at war lor is deafened rom then on there is a menacing elec tronic drone that ebbs and flows musically in the soundtrack It's sweeping subjective device virtu ally a whole movie heard through a kind of traumatic ringing in the ears of its focal point The young lovers return to home and find the village deserted In a scene of flashing horrors we see a huge pile of bodies behind one of the cottages The horror escalates along with the visionary episodes in the film In one lor and a cow stolen are trapped in the middle of an open field while Nazi flares and bullets and rockets whistle by them out of nowhere The cow which was to feed a camp of refugees and resis tance fighters is hit The horrors pile up Children are murdered Old men are burned A massive horde of German soldiers makes its way toward lor in the fog They take over an entire village and burn its occupants alive Everything about the filmmaking in this long horrific sequence is bra vura the cinematography by Al exei Rodionov the editing That long and abysmal atrocity makes the near sequence in look almost sketchy When we hear the Nazi explanation for the child massacre later he says are some coun tries that should have no The film reaches such an emo tional crescendo in fact that the ending turns into a kind of absurd delirium lor keeps shooting at a picture of Hitler while in the fevered version of fan tasy life time reverses its flow Cities rebuild Hitler turns from genocidal slaughterer back into roughneck politician and lor turns into a little boy At the end of the film a title tells us that what takes place in the film is based on fact The Nazis burned 628 Byelorussian villages wiping out the entire populations of them all women and children All of the performances in the film are superb Clearly we are see ing the cream of Russian filmmak ing' at work here Kravchenko in particular gives an amazing perfor mance as the young man ava lanched by previously unthinkable traumas The story is in fact that the young boy was hypnotized to play many of the scenes in the movie When you see his reactions you can believe that That performance too is different in kind from anything used to in American com mercial filmmaking In all a remarkable film Mill HlUH' I 1 NITE ONLY LATIN DANCE SHOW AT HEARTHSTONE MANOR JUNE 7 SUNDAY BY WORLD RENOWNED RON MONTEZ ELIZ CURTIS 7 TIMES USA CHAMPIONS SEEN ON STAR SEARCH OHIO ST CHAMPIONSHIP 8 PM ORCHESTRA OR PUBUC DANCING 10 PM DANCE SHOW CALL 873 8322 876 8837 I 1080 Main Street Buffalo New York BACH Toccata and ugue in Minor BARBER Toccata estiva for Organ and Orchestra James Bigham Soloist VAUGHAN WILLIAMS Dona Nubia Pacem TCII A IKO VS Overture (organ orchestra bells choirs cannon) HOLY TRINITY LUTHERAN CHURCH presents BUALO PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA Eiji Oue Conductor HOLY TRINITY CONCERT CHOIR ana UNITARIAN UNIVERSALIST CHURCH CHOIR in Concert WEDNESDAY AND THURSDAY MAY 20th 21st AT 8:15 PM Tickets Call 886 24 OO for ticket information THERE IS A PASSAGEWAT A GATE BEHIND WHICH THE DEMONS WAIT TO TAKE BACK WHAT WAS ONCE THEIRS coln JBL pray it's not too late C0WRY 0WAMNT CORPORATE JS THE VISTA ORGANIZATION EID WMMN KW PRODUCTION 'THEGAW' 3MRM mssa CD PG Bjrouu ounoMto SI fcleasrf bi Dm toiAlista fila Co Um M't'y Hiipf rynirt Cfcrtnii UMr fo 1 GENERAL CINEMA UNIVERSITY 837 8373 MAPLE RD BLVD MALL STARTS TODA GENERAL CINEMA SENECA MALL 826 3413 A WEST SENECA 1 AMC COMO 8 681 3100 APPLETREE MALL A.