War and Peace, Part IV: Pierre Bezukhov

The last part of Bondarchuk's four-part adaptation of War and Peace. After Borodino the army does not defend Moscow. Kutuzov decides to abandon the city and the people take to the roads. The French come in. The city is nearly empty; shops are open, houses deserted, and looting begins. Then the fire starts. Moscow burns for days and the film shoots it on a structure built at real scale. Pierre has stayed in the city. He has a purpose; he is thinking of killing Napoleon and walks the streets for it. He saves a child in the fire and is arrested. From there the part is a story of captivity. A line, an execution, a hut and a long march. A peasant called Platon is in the same hut. The man speaks simply, and Pierre finds there what he could not find in any of his books. The French withdraw. Winter closes in, the road lengthens, and the prisoners are moved with those who cannot walk left behind. What the narrative is interested in is not victory but plainness: Pierre becomes easier after losing everything, and the film says this openly as an argument. Natasha's line closes too. She finds Andrei among the carts carrying the wounded and the last meeting takes place. The fire is the centre of the part. The camera moving among the flames and the collapsing structures are among the film's most expensive sections. The scale matches the earlier parts. Soldiers from the Soviet army were used for the crowds and the production spread over years. The four parts together approach seven hours, and the work won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. Sergei Bondarchuk, Ludmila Savelyeva and Vyacheslav Tikhonov are in the cast. Sergei Bondarchuk directed. Who it is for: anyone following the series and anyone who likes historical cinema at scale. Who it is not for: anyone who has not started from the beginning; the part introduces nothing and assumes the previous three films.