As in a western, a convoy is attacked by surprise in a mountain pass. Two soldiers are made prisoners by rebel enemies. As in a suspense, the immobile time vibrates from waiting and from an insistent threat. What will come of it? As in a tragedy, fatality attends to the triumph of violence.
Sergei Bodrov was inspired by a short story by Tolstoy to get to an eternal cinema, beyond age, as an excellent and strong alcohol. He takes out from the anecdote all the absurd sharpness used by men to fight, to kill, to be revenged, but also everything that makes life so attractive and the injustice to die at 20. It took place in the heart of the Caucasus, in our days, you notice it due to the costumes and to the army vehicles. But this could take place elsewhere, at another time. The nature would be as splendid, the songs melancholic in the same way, and it would be also war.
Sasha (Oleg Menshikov), lieutenant of the Russian Army, and Vanya (Sergei Bodrov Junior), a young recruit, are ambushed and captured by maquisards of a Caucasian tribe. The chief of the rebels, Abdoul Mourat (Djemal Sikharoulidze) wants to use them as an exchange for his own son, made prisoner by the Russians. While waiting the deal to be finished, the two captives are kept in Abdoul's house and looked after - with a fascinated curiosity - by the burning eyes of the little girl, Dina, Abdoul's daughter.
With an extraordinary economy of means, Bodrov pulls out from this situation the subtle harmonics of intense inactivity, of hostile proximity, of hope bargained in the distance without being able to have an influence on the events. Sasha has recourses to a swanker irony. Vanya does not give up his serious honesty. And Abdoul - his dark intransigence. Strangely, there is more tenderness and living pain in these men reduced to long-suffering than in the cruel little Dina, child who plays a woman, who becomes Vanya's loving accomplice before becoming the implacable messenger of fate. "You must die", she announces with the calm of an oracle. "I don't want to", observes simply Vanya. He is the youth so humane, she puts up to him an ancient hard-heartiness. She looks like a prodigious little figure of tragic Necessity. The film comes up against this cruelty, transmitted since the ancient ages, with a superb absence of comments.

Submitted by Juliet Regibot