It's all there in Susanna's eyes.
A lifetime of savage civil war with Russia. Generations of sporadic bloodshed between the mountain and the motherland. A thousand years of people living in the rocks as time rolls past.
You can see these things so clearly in her joyless gaze and her playful glance. It's all there. And it's quite real.
Susanna Mekhralieva, who plays a young Chechen enchanted by a captured Russian soldier in "Prisoner of the Mountains," is not a professional actress. In real life, she's a schoolgirl from a remote Muslim hamlet near Chechnya who was plucked out of a classroom and placed in the middle of a movie about her times and her people. As Dina, her hard, brown eyes tell the tale even better than the subtitles on the screen. And this is why "Prisoner of the Mountains" works. It's so undeniably real.
Filmed in a beautifully stark village called Rechi, tucked hard against the Caucasus Mountains of southeastern Europe, the movie follows two Russian soldiers as they are ambushed while on patrol, then taken hostage by local rebels.
At its heart, this is a story about innocence lost. Vania, the younger and greener of the two soldiers, falls in love with Dina's ancient town and its misunderstood people. But that sweet affection doesn't ease the ugliness of the war surrounding all of them.
Screenwriter and director Sergei Bodrov, who used scores of Rechi residents in the movie, doesn't take sides in the greater conflict. (The movie never specifically says this is about Chechnya, though the circumstances are identical.)
The villagers, warm and deeply devout people, are defending their age-old land. The two soldiers, who love vodka, dancing and smiling just as much as their captors, are simply doing their job.
These sworn enemies slowly bond. But, at the same time, you feel them being pulled apart by larger forces. True sentiment never gains a foothold. "Prisoner of the Mountains" is loosely based on a 150-year-old story written by Leo Tolstoy titled "Prisoner of the Caucasus."
Tolstoy's tale is about a young Russian who is grabbed by mountain-bound marauders amid a long war between Russia and the smaller, adjoining lands. Sound familiar? Some things never change. Two years of real civil war in Chechnya paused last month when Russian troops pulled out. According to some estimates, the slaughter may have killed close to 100,000 people - mostly civilians. Incredibly, nothing was resolved when the soldiers left.
Tolstoy's ancient war may someday flare again.
For this movie, director Bodrov yanks Tolstoy's plot into the present and splashes it against a gorgeous backdrop of icy peaks and half shadows, mud and fire.
He tabbed his own son, Sergei Bodrov Jr., to play the novice solder Vania. With his goofy smile and compassionate outlook, he's perfectly matched against his fellow hostage, a ruthless and crass sergeant named Sacha (Oleg Menshikov). Chained together in close quarters, the two soldiers grow on each other and start to see life from the villagers' eyes.
And even though it is Dina's grizzled father who often holds the soldiers at gunpoint, the village girl and Vania eventually work their way into each other's hearts. But they also know war and religion will keep them apart forever. Into this bleak story, Bodrov thankfully splices bits of humor, including one offbeat scene in which Sacha and Vania groove to a Louis Armstrong song while imprisoned in a straw-laden barn.
Throughout the well-paced film, there are dozens of touching and interesting moments like that. But the movie's one flaw is that it doesn't dab hard enough at the bigger picture - the terrible toll of war - until very late in the story.
When that comes, though, Bodrov delivers a stinging strike.
Some films invade our souls by giving us a true taste of a rare place we otherwise would never savor. A hardscrabble place like Chechnya.
Bodrov lets us meet the people whose families and neighbors have actually suffered through the violent conflict. And in Dina, he gives us a sweet, very real face to remember when we hear about far-flung battles in the mountains bordering Russia.
Great movies are able to drop an unsettling nugget into our minds so we can roll it over and over in an attempt to smooth out the rough edges. But there's no smoothing out the awesome waste of war.

Submitted by Anni Nikolova