War and Peace, Part III: The Year 1812

The third part of Bondarchuk's four-part adaptation of War and Peace. The year is 1812. Napoleon enters Russia and the army advances by retreating; hundreds of kilometres are given up without fighting anywhere. The country is uneasy. The retreat is seen as betrayal and the command changes. Kutuzov takes over the army. He is old, heavy, and gives almost no orders. From there the part is given over to a single battle. The two armies face each other at Borodino. The preparation is long. Guns are placed, trenches are dug, the night passes, and the fog lifts in the morning. Pierre goes to the field as a civilian. He wants to see the war; he is wearing a white hat and nobody tells him what to do. The battle takes up most of the part. Smoke covers everything, the lines become confused, and the camera passes over the field showing thousands of men in a single shot. What the narrative is interested in is not strategy but chaos: at no point does the film make clear who is winning, and that is deliberate. Kutuzov's line carries Tolstoy's argument. The man does not direct the battle, he only waits, and it is said that victory does not come from commanders. Andrei is on the field too. He stands at the head of a regiment held in reserve and has to wait doing nothing. The scale is extraordinary. Tens of thousands of Soviet soldiers were used in the crowd scenes and separate manufacture was set up for guns and uniforms. Sergei Bondarchuk, Vyacheslav Tikhonov and Ludmila Savelyeva are in the cast. Sergei Bondarchuk directed. Who it is for: anyone who likes battle cinema at scale and knows the novel. Who it is not for: anyone who has not watched the series from the start; the part assumes the characters of the previous two films are known and introduces nobody.