Sergei Bondarchuk's WAR AND PEACE (1965-1967)

 

So... I decided to watch all of this over the course of 12 hours (I would've finished it sooner but Jack's gotta sleep sometimes).  As I was watching I wrote reviews of all four parts and compile them here for easier reading.

PART 1: ANDREI BOLKANSKY (1965)

"Death, wounds, the loss of my family - all this for nothing. I'd give everything for a moment of glory, for an instant of triumph and the love of people I do not know nor will ever now... and what if there were nothing left but to die? Well, if I have to, I will die brave as anyone."

With very little competition, I'd say this contains the most staggering *large scale* war sequences put to film. There have been more sustained filmed set pieces of course - Saving Private Ryan sure, and Chimes at Midnight - but this is a production putting this many bodies and those many souls and guns and everything and just... HOW?! It's dizzying and stimulating and it's a seven layer cake of grandiosity.

And for as high flying and free the camera is (and apparently Bondarchuk and his team created new ways to grt cameras to move up high and without the lugubrious cranes of old), how it careens and pivots and captures what had to have been thousands (tens of thousands?) of extras and hundreds of horses and all of the violence and carnage (not too bloody but pronounced enough to leave an impact), it's the quiet moments and humanity that draws me in: The scene where the one officer cant describe how his men fled so Andrei, recognizing his man cant say it, does so for him. Or more specifically that "Majestic" moment where Andrei is looking up at the "glorious sky" and it opens up for him like heaven, and how Bondarchuck films it is filmed at just the right speed and the clouds move so serenely that you almost forget that this is a man approaching death. Or, perhaps, there's no mistaking it.

And then in part 2, a bit about Pierre's duel in the snow with Dolokhov (*Bondarchuk's best acting to this point)... I'm sure I would have done the same. Or close to it. I'm sure I'd have that confounded reaction. That scene in and of itself is a dark, searing poem about pain and death and pride (how that stuff shirt in that uniform positions himself with that gun and aims even when all is lost), and it speaks to how potently Bondarchuk understands that he can and absolutely had to use the tools of Cinema at his disposal and push them forward. So he has what must have been a giant camera to have to move around, but maybe the government had lighter-weight ones too so his operators create a world that is disorientation and unease and despite all the regal rituals and great meals and musical accompaniment it's all so shaky because human beings maintain this world.

He knew he should've remembered to DVR the Oscars, damn it!

And as for Lise... Ill never forget that face after that moment with the wind blowing through 🥺 that's the other thing that's so masterful about this, how Bondarchuk uses sound: the dripping of the water around Pierre gets under your skin just as much as the wind when that death happens pierces your heart. It's like the cold of the Earth is what killed her, not even the baby. He understands how to control and manipulate the camera, like when it becomes untethered and hand held and wild and unwieldy, but he also understands that what we hear, how a silence after so much noise will move us even more deeply than mayhem.

This is an adaptation that doesn't fear to be literary, but uses literary devices of narration to almost experimental effect: how a voice will be coming from perhaps someone's mind, but maybe from beyond and ethereal, with multiple narrators. Scorsese must have seen this and soaked in it like an acid trio in a whirlpool.

"I am not saying it is logic that convinces. What convinces is seeing someone close to you disappear...there... into nowhere, leaving you starting down into the abyss. I stared into it."

(*anyone else think Bondarchuk looks like Rod Steiger? Interesting to think the coincidence that Steiger at the same time was filming Doctor Zhivago, the Hollywood epic version of something like this)

PART II: NATASHA ROSTOVA (1965)

"You will learn to know yourself within a year."

"... a whole year?!"

"The actual life of real people went on as usual."

Sergey Bondarchuk understood that no matter how many men and women are dressed to the nines in the most extravagant costumes, gowns and 19th century uniforms galore, and how much the music can soar and the camera can go around and move up high in that sumptuous and sensational ballroom, it's the incredible face of Savelyeva as Natasha, done almost like a split-diopter (though I wonder if that's really it technically how they did it), her profile looking on in quiet desperation for someone to take her hand to dance and make her "His" that leaves the absolute heart-pounding impression. Someone take her hand, blast it all! That distance is more powerful and resonant than any opulent piece of regal theater.

And of course when Andrei does, and Pierre looks on... a whole other dynamic for the film, where before we've seen these two men as great friends, things crack open to a more emotional volatile level (even if the two men don't even realize it'll happen yet). An equally sensitive moment is that engagement note of one year between Andrei and Natasha; it's amazing how powerful in 70mm a push-in on a face can be when it's done to precise emotional precision. There's also a sublime set piece when Natasha and Anatol and some of the other main characters are watching a concert and how Bondarchuk shows all of their faces, looking, thinking, holding back but making eyes, you can understand in these matter of minutes what is happening inside of Natasha, what can her heart do with all of this(?)

On the whole, I don't know if I entirely loved this as much as the first part (the section at the section at the cabin drags until Natasha dances to the guitar), and there's an odd bit of soft focus and those strange splices of like diamond-images as Natasha dances with this new man after the concert. But Bondarchuk gets to show us his whole heart, and understanding of what Tolstoy understood as far as romantic reckoning, as an artist (with himself too as someone who can look like the saddest man who looks like a boy in his suit that fits him so ill), and this is necessary for the rest of the story to click. And then there's a surprisingly graphic scene involving wolves and dogs attacking each other during a hunt. Woof.

I bet Michael Cimino must've seen *that* ballroom dance set piece and thought 'shit, I can do one better' and... that's another story.

PART III: THE YEAR 1812

Sadly, he's not about to break into song

As the Marx Brothers once sang, we're going to war!

And yes yes the gigantic battle, but what about that minute of film when the like 200 or so men strip down and into the water for that skinny dip? 😳

"Enough. Enough, mankind."

The Year 1812, a masterpiece of a film unto itself, includes such an insane series of battle tableaus, and at first not even so much for how it's shot or edited - though there are absolutely a number of compositions and movements that are chaotic, though a kind of controlled chaos, like we trust where all this delirium is going, including cross fades that emphasize a nightmare scenario of bodies and masses/movements and at least one shot that could be called from the point of view of a bullet, and another that might be Andrei's soul leaving himself - rather than for everything of total madness by way of the decisions by the Russian side that happened in the battle of Bordillo. There's a point where Andrei's men are told to be in reserve... and we learn in voice over a third of the men are lost when "at ease" .... and this is at the height of damage in the battle! Not that it would seem, of course, they could've done much in the face of Napoleon's multitudes of rampage and military might.

This may my very well be a battle sequence put to film that puts so many others to shame or just to challenge. If I were a filmmaker staging a battle scene today I'd look on and possibly despair, and this is from the mid 1960s (albeit this is also filmmaking that is unbound by concerns like a tight budget or resources), and it feels so small and puny to watch this on a small screen. There does come a point once it's an hour in and there's not a lot of time for dialog or even much narration; it's a series of cascading Dolly shots and flying camera movements, like the lens barely can keep up with the explosions and masses of horses and people with their guns and bayonets going in so many different directions it's hard to tell up from down or left from right.

 
I don't think it's an accident that this is in a way such a disorderly shot and edited film when it comes to telling what's happening at the height of the carnage; on the contrary that's actually it's major strength. There are points when Bondarchuk and his collaborators create the kind of cinema that I've only seen a handful of other filmmakers achieve (Coppola in Apocalypse Now as one example, and Ryan in D-Day but even then that's more polished than this) which is this sense of presenting war as something that is not exciting but is completely terrifying and devastating.

Anyone from any part of the globe watching this can yell this battle is going extremely badly for the Russians. But by the time we get to that general claiming they're fighting the enemy back and he'll attack tomorrow while a giant napkin is on his chest, you know the chaos has reached unbearable proportions. This is so big that it's almost too big even for the filmmakers to contain, like God's unrelenting POV is here.

"Lullaby, lullaby."

I am slightly confused why Pierre stuck it out for the entire battle, though it is fascinating to see how the other soldiers are kind of amused by his presence (a Gentleman you say). But him being there does raise the stakes on a personal level; his sense of bravery is at the expense of the disarray of what's in this battle. What I come away with watching this and km sure others have as well is that there is no glory in what we are seeing. This is called a "moral victory" and words like "impotence" are spoken in the narration, but all of the bodies, all the dead, all in gray and dark hues on screen, caked in mud and crap and refuse and blood (though the blood isn't shown as graphically as in more modern cinema), this isn't meant to be inspiring - quite the opposite. The Year 1812 is staggering to behold.

To quote another man in a war scene: "I've never seen so many men wasted so badly."

PART IV: PIERRE BEZUKHOV (1967)

Somewhere at some time in the past twenty years, George Lucas watched this and said at the end, "you know, you can do all that with computers now."

There's so much I can write about this part, which displays Bondarchuk's daring but also his deep well of humanity (it may have been from the novel, but there's still heart to those moments with the freezing abandoned French soldiers; such men were pillaging and destroying the city of Moscow, but this filmmaker still shows a bold amount of compassion, or at least doesn't revel in their sorrow, as the men sing together in the face of certain death). And when I say daring I don't mince words: he shows here what he's done throughout his epic but even more so, that he and his collaborators are willing and able to try any and everything to raise cinema to another plane of consciousness. Just the moment when Andrei is seeing (perhaps) what his death may be, as a small figure superimposed in an abyss going through a door to meet his end would be enough for most directors to say they created something unique in the span of their careers. For Bondarchuk, it's just another scene in the span of so many others.

But what is so impactful about War and Peace, this part and the entire film in its four parts, is that it was a giant film, giant in its full SOUND, like you're seeing a sort of visual symphony, to be ostentatious about it, and Bondarchuk is constantly taking risks. When in this part, for prime example, Pierre is in Moscow as the city is being burned down piece by piece, and there are dozens if not hundreds of extras, many moving parts, and there is chaos on screen, but the storytelling manages to walk a very tight rope to not become too chaotic, if that makes sense. It's like Bondarchuk is discovering all the tools at his disposal, figuring out new ways to turn a camera around on its axis, and it all fits as a piece (think like Michael Bay if it wasn't mean and had heart, or Michael Cimino with less drag).

This is a sequence of scenes and set pieces where Pierre is at a loss what to do, in particular including a woman in a panic for her child (who is possibly in a burning building), and Pierre somehow manages to get someone to help him to find the child, and then... he returns with the crying tiny person and the mom isn't there. Will he be imprisoned and then what will happen to her? There is a direction for the character to go in this scene, in other words, and so it's something for the pandemonium to be tethered to. Even when it becomes more of a poetical/hyper-cinematic subjective mode, where Bondarchuk and the editors keep cutting back to his face as we are seeing the soldiers' destruction and fires blazing this way and that, you never think "oh they don't know what they're doing." It's like following how a mind or a brain processes trauma, which is in shards and pieces and fragments.

There's high melodrama, high operatic beats, whether it's Natasha and her mother reacting in BIG CAPITAL LETTERS to the worst possible news imaginable, or the French soldiers in the snow becoming the worst versions of themselves (those poor horses), or those shots in the sky where it seems like God, or a God, has taken the controls of the impossibly for 1965 nimble drone camera (and it's *not* a drone) and turned this into a prayer of some kind about our place in life and what it means to do good or evil in the world. I do think the ending is too abrupt - from what I've read the filmmakers cut the denouement from the Novel where it cuts ahead to 1820 when they're in middle age and the next round of war is coming soon, cyclical and all - especially given all the characters have been through, like it is Missing a real final moment or conversation between Pierre and Natasha after *everything* they've experienced (Andrei, too).

But it's hard not to see this as standing so tall and, actually, free as a piece of art. So many films, even ones by great commercial directors and auteurs, have to be beholden at points to demands of the market or for tastes that ultimately put something personal in a box (even my lords Scorsese and David Lynch or Werner Herzog, Bunuel, are working in a genre the majority of the time). Bondarchuk isn't ignorant of what an epic war/romance film should have, but it's staggering what he gets in here that is less beholden to modern film (certainly to epics of the time like David Lean or Anthony Mann would do) and more to the epics of silent film, to experimental cinema. It's like Abel Gance and (on a good day) Terrence Malick working on a canvas together at times, but even then this is still a personal work by this director- not least because he's also the star (and a good actor at that, if not a perfectly cast man, ie maybe someone younger would be better).

So, yeah, good movie.