how to live life
by
Douglas Messerli
Valentin
Yezhov and Grigori Chukhrai (screenplay), Grigori Chukhrai (director) Баллада о солдате (Ballada o soldate) (Ballad
of a Soldier) / 1959, USA 1960
The fool that he is, he rejects a ribbon
or a commendation for a quick trip home to his poor mother so that he might
repair her leaking roof. We now know he is truly an innocent and holy fool, and
the general cannot refuse such a simple and meaningless request. He asks only
for two days, but the general allows him nearly a week.
As we soon learn, he will need far more
time, as he meets a depressed older soldier, certain, now with a missing leg,
that he will be rejected by his wife, and later a young stowaway girl,
determined to return to her husband, Shura (Zhanna Prokhorenko), a girl as
innocent as he is, but far more terrified by her journey. He saves a
disillusioned soldier’s life and promises to deliver up soap to his wife. He
quickly demonstrates his protective nature to the young Shura, ultimately
gaining her trust and amazement that a man like him might even exist. Along the
way, he bribes a greedy trainmen, misses his connections, and time and again
demonstrates his total belief in human goodness, winning friends wherever he
goes—all despite the fact that we already know that this “ballad” to be a sad
one, with a horrible ending (never actually detailed) for the truly brave and
quite idiotic young soldier.
Shura finally comes to trust him so fully
that, when after a run for water during a station stop, he does not return, she
waits for him; and she finally admits, in what we, if not our innocent hero,
perceives is a complete embracement of his love, that she has no fiancée,
presumably ready to accept his kisses. But he moves only forward for, finally,
only a few moments time left to see his mother, and giving up all the love he
has offered others.
It, finally, is that tragic fact, that
this boy so full of joy and love can’t truly receive it from all the others he
meets, that makes Chukhrai’s film so totally international. He’s not just a
Russian soldier of World War II, he is everyone who believes and trusts, he is
every young man so in love with life that he seems almost invincible.
Unfortunately, the world does not allow such a being to easily survive.
Despite competition at the 1960 Cannes
film festival between international giants such as Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and new works by Bergman,
Antonioni, Buñuel, along with the American blockbuster, Ben Hur, Chukhrai’s small Russian film received great acclaim. As critic
Vida Johnson has written: the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Gerassimov explained the
film’s fresh appeal: “The pathos of Fellini in La Dolce Vita could be put this way: One should not live like this;
the pathos of Chukhrai in Ballad of a
Soldier could be summed up as: We should live like this.”
Los Angeles,
March 7, 2016
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