Hollywood took its time translating the Vietnam War into cinema, but Russian director Sergei Bodrrov shoots straight from the front - and straight from the heart.
"Prisoner of the Mountains," Russia's official entry for best foreign film in this year's Academy Awards, was shot near the smoldering war zone of Chechnya. This timely, touching drama about two Russian soldiers captured by Muslim guerrillas opens Friday at the Fine Arts.
Ongoing hostilities in Chechnya blocked Bodrov from shooting there, so he picked the village of Rechi in nearby Dagestan for his seven-month sojourn in the rugged mountains. His draft-age son, Sergei Bodrov Jr., plays a sensitive conscript shackled to a cynical older soldier played by Oleg Menshikov. Bodrov cast a 12-year-old local to play an ostracized village girl who befriends the kinder captive and aids his escape.
Bodrov based his script on "Prisoner of the Caucasus," a tale penned by Russian author Leo Tolstoy and published in 1872 in a children's primer. Like the young Ernest Hemingway in the new movie "In Love and War," Tolstoy saw war as raw material for literature; he tramped around Chechnya from 1851-1854 with his brother, an officer in the Russian army during a bitter occupation of the remote republic.
Bodrov and co-screenwriters Arif Aliev and Boris Giller update Tolstoy's adventure about two Russian soldiers captured by "evil-smelling Tartars" to the present, when Russian President Boris Yeltsin labels Chechen nationalists "bandits" and "mad dogs."
When Yeltsin requested a preview of the privately funded "Prisoner of the Mountains," Bodrov lent him his only print for a weekend and quizzed Yeltsin's bodyguards when they returned it.
"I'm not so naive as to believe I changed his mind," Bodrov said. Nonetheless, Bodrov pointed out that a week later Yeltsin suddenly softened his hard line against negotiating with rebel leaders. "Prisoner of the Mountains" humanizes the unreason of war by intertwining families and enemies. Laced with touches of magical realism, the film climaxes with a heartwarming reprieve answered by gut-wrenching revenge.
On the festival circuit, "Prisoner of the Mountains" won awards in Prague and Cannes, but it was withdrawn from the Chicago International Film Festival last fall once it found a U.S. distributor. Treated to a retrospective of his Russian features at the Toronto film festival in 1994, the 44-year-old director also picked up awards at fests in Tbilissi, Turin, Montreal and Berlin.
Bodrov splits his time between Moscow and Venice Beach, Calif., where he's planning a road movie about a 14-year-old girl and a Russian bear. For his first American project, he co-wrote "Somebody to Love" with Alexandre Rockwell in 1996.
Before writing screenplays, Bodrov wrote articles for the Soviet satire magazine Crocodile. "It was the one place you could write truthful stories," Bodrov said with a chuckle. "We used to write between the lines and people would read between the lines."
Corruption furnished a rich vein of story leads. Once Bodrov investigated the chief of a backwater state farm who tapped a pipeline from the public bath house to his own residence. Workers complained that his indulging in long, steamy showers deprived them of their weekly rations of hot water. "First he tells me, `What is your salary? I want to give you 10 times more. Go to Moscow and take a rest,' " said Bodrov, who promptly phoned the Crocodile office. "Should I report his bribe? Go to the police?" No way, ordered his wary editor. "You might get arrested for that."
Bodrov turned to screenwriting and graduated from the State Institute of Cinematography in 1974. "I wrote ironic comedies - maybe I wasn't brave enough to be a dissident - but directors would only use the plots of my scripts," said Bodrov, who later began directing. An early effort, "The Non-Professionals," was a road movie with a bootleg rock beat. "I used a lot of Beatles music," he admitted. "We didn't have any idea you had to pay for rights."
Besides getting acquainted with the work of American directors such as John Cassavetes, Bodrov also is currently learning about American-style deals. "We are free now, and freedom is very expensive," he said, pointing to the collapse of old communist oversight and underwriting. "A lot of Russian directors are frustrated because they do not know how to get their movies made. They try to please these rich Russians now - and they're crazy sometimes."
Better connected than his post-glasnost peers, Bodrov already has become a benchmark of a more accessible, commercial cinema. Back in 1992, Russian critic Michael Brashinsky and U.S. film professor Andrew Horton, co-authors of The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition, compared Bodrov to more esoteric, celebrated directors. "The Bodrovs of the new Soviet cinema are not Tarkovskys or Paradjanovs, but neither are they hacks," they wrote.
During film school Bodrov worked for Andrei Tarkovsky as an electrician and best boy on that internationally acclaimed auteur's film "Stalker." "Every film culture needs to have a number of craftspeople like Bodrov in order for the Tarkovskys to emerge," Brashinsky wrote. "And maybe, who knows, the time of Tarkovskys has passed away."
Five years later, though, in International Variety, Brashinsky applauds "Prisoner of the Mountains" as "by far the best Russian film of the year," adding that Bodrov "comes of directorial age in this picture." The time of the Bodrovs may be at hand.

Submitted by Anni Nikolova