The Ascent

Winter 1942, Belarus. Two Soviet partisans set out through the snow to find food for a starving unit and fall into German hands. In the interrogation room both are offered the same deal and give two different answers. The film is not interested in the war. It is interested in how betrayal comes to look reasonable. Sotnikov chooses to die, Rybak chooses to live, and the film refuses to draw the second man as a monster. That is exactly what makes it heavy. The form is close to religious. Snow, white sky and a camera pressed against faces put it nearer to a passion narrative than to war-film iconography, and the ending is staged not as an execution but as a ceremony. Larisa Shepitko directed. The film won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival, the second film by a woman director to take that prize. It was her last. In 1979, while scouting locations for an adaptation of Valentin Rasputin's novel Farewell to Matyora, the driver of the crew's van fell asleep and nobody in the vehicle survived. Her husband Elem Klimov both finished that film and made a twenty-minute documentary about her, called Larisa. Boris Plotnikov and Vladimir Gostyukhin star. Who it is for: viewers who want heavy war drama and cinema built around a moral dilemma. Who it is not for: anyone looking for action. The film is cold, slow and deliberately suffocating.