Prisoner of the Mountains belongs in a way to that venerable genre, the Russian war film. Only things have been turned inside out. Russia's enemies here are not the ferocious counterrevolutionary White Armies of the Civil War (as in, say, Chapayev), or the savage German invaders of World War II (The Rainbow, Fate of a Man, and numerous memorable others). In Sergei Bodrov's film, Russians are the invaders, their Chechen opponents are tough, but noble, and war itself is the cruel enemy.
Bodrov (b. 1948), formerly a journalist and scriptwriter, came to prominence as a director during the liberating, glasnost wave of the Gorbachev years, when once forbidden subjects and styles filled Soviet screens. To cite two of his best known films: The Non-Professionals (1987) follows a troupe of young amateur musicians through rural Kazakhstan in a detached, semidocumentary way, while Freedom is Paradise (1989) is an unadorned look at Soviet society through the eyes of a lad who escapes from his reform school to seek out his father in a distant prison camp. Bodrov is clearly animated by humanist concerns, and by something I've heard more than one Russian in the film world describe as essential for the health of post-Soviet society - compassion. The director has said that he wanted to make a film set in a contemporary battleground - Bosnia, for example, or the former Soviet republic of Tadjikistan - not in order to engage political issues or take political sides, but to claim eternal human values amid war's ravages. When the smoldering situation in the Northern Caucasus flared into a full-scale war of Chechen independence from Moscow, Bodrov had an ideal dramatic vehicle for expressing his compassion - that war plus a Tolstoy short story about an analogous war a century and a half earlier.
It took a certain amount of courage for a Russian director to craft a pacifist film about the Chechen war, and one, moreover, in which the Chechens are presented more positively than the Russians. (Many Russians have objected to the film on these grounds.) Passions run very high in both camps. The Chechens, a Muslim people numbering about a million and a half today, have been battling Russian control since the early nineteenth century. In 1944 Stalin ordered wholesale deportations of the Chechen population to Central Asia for collaborating with the Germans. After the U.S.S.R. broke up in 1991, they started their drive to independence.
>From the Russian side, the popular view of the Chechens is of a sullen minority involved in illegal activity (like other ethnic groups from the Caucasus, they are known derisively in Russian as "Blacks") and blamed for much of the organized criminal violence around such areas as drug trafficking and gun-running that have plagued major cities in post-Soviet Russia. From the official point of view, the Chechen quest for independence threatens, if successful, the unity of the fragile Russian Federation, made up of dozens of non-Russian minorities.
None of these issues appear in Bodrov's film, nor, consequently, is the exceptional ferocity of the two-year war explained. The Russians have resorted to massive aerial bombardment and artillery barrages, while the Chechen guerrilla campaign has seen mass hostage taking. The site of the film's action is not even identified as Chechnya. (It was shot in neighboring Dagestan.) It is a given that we are in Chechnya, and that the Russian army is there. Why it is there, and why the Chechens give battle, is left to the audience to intuit. I see in these omissions not only Bodrov's above-the-fray pacificism (both sides are victimized by the war, whatever the issues), but the severe post-Communist 'reaction-formation' of so much of the Russian intelligentsia, filmmakers included, against all 'politics' and political ideologies. What counts for them are the 'normal' human currencies of love, decency, loyalty, friendship, kindness - or Bodrov's compassion.
Which brings us back to Tolstoy, and another peculiar (minor) omission. The film credits the story to "an idea of Boris Giller," one of its producers and screenwriters, but any educated Russian knows it is derived from a spare and touching Tolstoy short story written for young people in 1872, based on the author's experiences as a Russian officer in the Caucasus a generation earlier. In the Tolstoy tale, A Prisoner of the Caucasus (subtitled, A True Story), two Russian officers are captured and held in shackles for ransom by a Chechen villager. One of them escapes with the assistance of the Chechen's young daughter, a girl of thirteen, who is moved by pity and compassion (and perhaps something else) for the Russian.
Flash forward a century and a half for Bodrov's film, based on the outline of the Tolstoy story, embellished and transferred artfully to contemporary Chechnya. The Russians are still there, and the Chechens are still fighting them and taking them hostage. In other works, Tolstoy's descriptions of the hatred the Chechens felt for the Russians even read like the dispatches of journalists there in our own day.
Bodrov's Prisoner is a handsome and melancholy war drama set in the spectacular Caucasus, with Pavel Lebeshev's camera roaming beautifully in panoramic long shots across the flat-topped roofs of mountain villages. (Lebeshev is the talented cinematographer whose work may be seen in many of Nikita Mikhalkov's films, including Slave of Love and Oblomov). Bodrov's two captured Russians are a hard-drinking cynical veteran NCO played with effective swagger by Oleg Menshikov, the dark messenger of death in Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun, sporting a moustache here and looking like a carefree Russian Errol Flynn; and a young and innocent recruit - Sergei Bodrov, Jr., the director's son, not a professional actor but turning in a superb performance as a reluctant soldier who learns some life - and death - lessons in the Chechen killing fields. The two are brought closely together in captivity after a nicely shot opening ambush scene.
The film unfolds in a series of episodes that are paced briskly by Russian standards, rather glacially by Western norms, especially for an adventure film. But taking time with the story works to its advantage; we get the full flavor of several different relationships as they develop. There is the buddy aspect in the older soldier/young recruit pairing. They see the world differently, and get on each other's nerves, but they recognize they are in this thing together and must bear it with patience and humor - the very Russian characteristics of endurance, and indifference to danger. In one scene they dance rollickingly to Louis Armstrong's "Let My People Go." In another, the crusty Sasha (Oleg Menshikov) lapses into nostalgia and despair, and reaches to touch the young Vanya's hand as the soundtrack soars with the patriotic hymn "The Slavyanka": a very moving moment. (Leonid Desyatnikov's haunting score alternates Caucasian motifs of reeds and woodwinds with Russian tunes, especially "The Blue Scarf," a sentimental ballad popular during World War II.)
The second important relationship involves the two Russians and their captor Abdul (the Georgian actor Djemal Sikharuklidze), an imposing figure who wants to exchange them for his son, held by the Russian army, and resists the demand of some elders to kill the two. His dramatic act of kindness in the film's denouement matches the tenderness shown by his young daughter. Her relationship with the young recruit Vanya is both central to the film's narrative and its emotional core. Played brilliantly by another nonprofessional (Susanna Mekhralieva, discovered by Bodrov in a Dagestan schoolroom), the dark-eyed Nina is captivated by Vanya, by his plight of course, but perhaps by budding romantic feelings for him as well. She talks to him, dances for him, dresses for him, and ultimately frees him in a courageous act of defiance against all the force of patriarchy and custom. (Unlikely? Well, Tolstoy wrote that it was a true story, and anyway it serves Bodrov's purpose well.)
Vanya, fearing the trouble her act will cause her, refuses to escape. The powerful climax follows: a long, long walk past a cemetery (a nice touch) as Abdul leads Vanya to his execution ('dead man walking,' Chechen style). Abdul is bound now to avenge the killing of his son by the Russians during an escape attempt, but in a heart-stopping moment as we wait with Vanya for the fatal bullet, Abdul fires into the air and walks away somberly, back to the camera. Enough of killing, that walk seems to say.
I should note that some have interpreted that last scene differently. Since we never see Abdul fire into the air, and since the traditional code of vengeance would strongly suggest otherwise - Abdul would shoot him, period - the alternate explanation has a now dead Vanya magically trying to wave off the Russian helicopter gunships overhead as they target the village. And in a ghostly voice-over afterword, Vanya tells of trying to dream of the villagers "he came to love." This interpretation is fueled by two episodes in which the executed Sasha - Sasha's ghost - appears to Vanya. (Sasha had killed two Chechens cold-bloodedly in an attempted escape; his throat is cut in retaliation.) So why not have Vanya's ghost turn up as well? I think Bodrov's two brief excursions into magic realism are ill-conceived and clumsily brought off, but in that last scene, either way, the 'real' Vanya or the 'magic' Vanya conveys the same message: the merciful Chechens, people he developed an affection for, are repaid with brutality.
There is one other clumsy scene in an otherwise consistently moving and well-made film that amply earned its Academy-Award nomination in the foreign-language category. Bodrov stages a folkloristic tableau of Chechen warriors dancing, drinking, wrestling, and roasting some meat at a campfire. It comes off as kitschy and patronizing. The film has plenty of authentic local color without it in numerous village scenes. The contrast between premodern village life shown in the film and the very modern instruments of war (on both sides, though the Russians have the overwhelming fire power), is striking. As of this writing, the guns are silent in Chechnya. A peculiar peace has materialized: the Chechens claim independence and act that way, while the Russians deny their independence but agree to let them act that way. There were rumors in Moscow last year that President Boris Yeltsin asked for a private screening of Prisoner of the Mountains, and was so affected by the film that it impelled him to redouble efforts for peace. Wonderful, if true. Now that would be real good magic realism.

Submitted by Anni Nikolova