The Search

A film set in Chechnya in 1999. A village is raided. A camera records it on a soldier's phone and the event is shown through that footage. Hadji is nine. His parents are killed and he takes his baby brother and runs. He leaves the baby at a doorway. Then he keeps walking and stops speaking. Carole works for the European Union. She has come to the region to prepare a human rights report and cannot get anyone to listen. She finds the boy in the street. She takes him in, tries to talk to him, and gets no sound for weeks. From there the film runs two lines side by side. The woman's effort to make the child speak again on one, his sister's search for him on the other. There is a third line. Kolya is a Russian of nineteen; he is picked up in the street, put into the army, and changes step by step at the training camp. What the narrative is interested in is not war but manufacture: the film shows at the same time how a child is silenced and how a young man is made into a soldier. Kolya's line is its strongest. The narrative neither sympathises with him nor turns him into a monster. The source is a remake of a film from 1948. The original was set in Germany after the Second World War and the structure here follows it closely. The film competed at Cannes and was harshly received; it was found politically one-sided and was written about as failing to meet expectations after the director's previous film. Bérénice Bejo, Annette Bening, Maxim Emelianov and Abdul Khalim Mamatsuiev are in the cast. Michel Hazanavicius wrote and directed. Who it is for: anyone interested in war drama and in conflicts that have been little told. Who it is not for: anyone expecting a balanced view; the film holds the Russian side almost entirely at fault.