They Fought for Their Motherland

A Soviet film set in the Don region in the summer of 1942. A regiment is retreating. Their numbers are down, their ammunition is gone, and they are passing through villages they are leaving behind. The villagers do not receive them well. Women stand at the roadside and ask why they are running; the soldiers cannot answer. The film focuses on a few men. A miner, an agronomist, a combine driver, a corporal; all of them did something else before the war. From there the film proceeds in two parts. The march and the halts, then a defence on a hill. At the halts they talk. Food, women, marriage, jokes; the narrative deliberately loosens here. Then the attack comes. Tanks, aircraft and artillery; the sequence runs long and the camera stays in the trenches. What the narrative is interested in is not victory but retreat: unusually for Soviet cinema the film describes a defeat and does not hide the shame. The line about the soldier who goes deaf is the most affecting. A man cannot hear after an explosion and runs from the hospital back to his unit. The source is Mikhail Sholokhov's novel; the book was never finished and the film was built from the existing sections. The production has a story. Vasily Shukshin, one of the leads, died suddenly on a boat on the Volga in October 1974 while shooting continued; even so he appears in his part in the finished film. The crowd scenes were built at real scale and the director appears in the cast himself. Vasily Shukshin, Vyacheslav Tikhonov, Sergei Bondarchuk and Georgy Burkov are in the cast. Sergei Bondarchuk directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes Soviet war cinema and battle scenes at scale. Who it is not for: anyone looking for an individual story; the narrative follows a group and goes deeply into nobody.