"Prisoner of the Mountains," Russia's finalist for a best-foreign-film Academy Award, demonstrates just how critical a filmmaker can be of a once-totalitarian nation. But its acerbic depiction of the failed war against Chechnya is only one of the strengths of this modern adaptation of a 150-year-old Leo Tolstoy story. Directed by Sergei Bodrov from a screenplay he co-wrote, and co- starring the director's son, this portrait of prisoners of an absurd war in many ways resembles the films of the glorious Soviet past. Its handling of its setting, high in an ancient village of intricate stone structures, calls to mind the great silent films that explored the farthest reaches of Mother Russia. Its story of two comrades in arms is told with the realism and sensitivity of such international successes of the postwar years as "The Cranes Are Flying."
The senior Bodrov's first film to achieve wide distribution blends humorous and surreal touches with its rigorous depiction of life in a remote mountain hamlet where life goes on as it has for hundreds of years. Working in Rechi, a rough assemblage of ornately piled rocks with a magnificent view of surrounding ranges, only 300 kilometers from Chechnya, Bodrov captures scenes of Muslim peasant life, from threshing wheat with a team of donkeys to grinding grain in a water-driven millhouse.
This is one of those films that - like the Macedonian "Before the Rain" - carries its audiences to an unknown, mysterious world that actually exists, a place only the most intrepid traveler will ever see. Nearly every shot of "Prisoner of the Mountains" brims with an odd fascination, forcing contemplation of how human hands piled stones for the diversely patterned walls with such rough, eternal artistry.
"Prisoner" begins far from the Caucasus mountains that give the film its title (Tolstoy's tale was called "Prisoner of the Caucasus").
Vania, the new Army recruit played by the junior Bodrov, is undergoing the humiliations of examinations, ultimately requiring him to strip to his skin before he joins a trotting brigade of similarly unclad males, all with their hands clenched over their groins.
The absurd comedy of the army's inductions and reductions give way to Vania's first brush with death. Passing through the heights of the terrain standing in for Chechnya, Russian armored personal carriers are attacked from above. In the firefight, two uniformed men are shot and left for dead. One is poor, innocent Vania. The other turns out to be a seasoned, cynical, bitter veteran, Sacha, appropriately nicknamed "Sly."
Once Vania and Sly are taken to the mountain hamlet, where they are chained together, the pace of "Prisoner" grows deliberate, underlining both the tedium of imprisonment in a stable and the timelessness of the world of the Muslim villagers. Many of the inhabitants hate the Russians and want to kill the prisoners of war. But the patriarchal Abdoul-Mourat sees them as chattels of value to be traded for a captured son.
Much of "Prisoner" focuses on the war of nerves between the strange bedfellows. Sly, played as an almost Bogartian figure by the dashing, dark Oleg Menshikov, teases and baits the naive Vania mercilessly. The lad, good-heartedly acted by Sergei Bodrov Jr., gradually adjusts to the tough guy. In time they truly become comrades, bent on escape.
Vania, who likes to make things, forms an attachment to Abdoul-Mourat's pretty, curious, pubescent Dina, who resembles a baby-fat Winona Ryder as played by the piquantly understated Susanna Mekhralieva. The feeling between them - her puppy love, his sympathy - becomes a pivotal element as the film darkens, then explodes into the disasters of war.
Working with a largely amateur cast recruited in Dagestan, the director has created a deeply textured, haunting, primal and finally painful film. The tall, lean Jemal Sikharulidze, with his cold, imperious sculptured visage, proves invaluable in his commanding playing of Abdoul-Mourat. Here is a figure of the old world who wants above all to save his teacher son, an emblem of a embattled, uncertain, perhaps doomed future.

Submitted by Anni Nikolova