Disclaimer: This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Timestamps are as recorded.

Sam (00:14):
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about the film Trial on the Road, which came out in 1986. It was directed by Aleksei German and written by Yuri German. It’s also known as Checkpoint or Checkup on the Road. It was shot in 1971, but not released until censorship relaxed in the Soviet Union. It’s based on a short story by the director’s father, a famous Russian writer named Yuri German.

The story is called Operation Happy New Year. It came out in 1965. I did do a quick search for it online, but I don’t think it’s available in English. It draws loosely from real events that he experienced as a war correspondent during World War II. It is a drama about a Red Army sergeant who tries to win back the trust of his comrades after collaboration with the Germans. The title, Trial on the Road, comes from what partisans would do to collaborators.

When they encountered vehicles full of Russians who were working with the Germans, they would hold a roadside trial and kill all but one, who was spared to spread the word to others who might want to collaborate. It’s available on YouTube with English subtitles. We also listened to the podcast World War II: Both Sides of the Wire, episode 74, about Soviet partisans, for a little more background information. What did you think of this movie?

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (01:27):
Don’t know. That’s a very concise opinion, isn’t it? No, I think I enjoyed it mostly. It’s very particular. It’s in black and white. It’s in Russian, obviously. I think I enjoyed the second half a bit more than the first half, because I struggled to understand what was going on through the first half.

And by the second half I’d kind of figured out who was who and what was happening, so that was helpful. It’s not a very long movie though. If you want to watch an hour and a half of Russian, you should definitely watch it. I think it’s an interesting perspective and one that we’ve not seen that much of before, so that’s good. I would probably watch it again now that I understand a bit more about what is going on in it. So yeah, I enjoyed it, but it’s not my favourite. How about you?

Sam (02:20):
I was interested in diving into another Soviet movie. Soviet filmmaking about World War II tends to be more focused on the brutality of war and less on the individual heroism and glory of Western movies. They tend to be a little bleaker. This one is no exception. The whole thing is set during the Russian winter. It looks very cold and miserable and not very pleasant to be in. And I was also interested in this movie because it was

not allowed to be released in the Soviet Union for so many years. In the era in which it was made, it was viewed as anti-patriotic. The Soviet Film Bureau that was supposed to approve all of the movies thought that the depiction of the behavior of the partisans was anti-patriotic. They said it distorted the image of a heroic time. That’s a direct quote, I believe. And

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (03:08):
Mm-hmm.

Sam (03:09):
the fact that the plot is about the rehabilitation of a traitor, they didn’t particularly enjoy that. They thought, why are we depicting this guy as having a redemption arc when he was a collaborator with the Germans? And this movie really does dismantle some of the myths around this united resistance to Nazism. Obviously, the Soviet partisan movement is a huge part of their nation building, a huge part of the cultural memory. And so this movie shows a little bit more nuance around that. Some of the decisions that people were forced to make in wartime for their own survival.

It depicts the futility of war. We see that for real humans there’s not really any such thing as a hero, or the word hero doesn’t have a lot of meaning. And broadly, I really enjoyed this movie and I’m glad we’re going to talk about it today.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (03:51):
I do agree. I also definitely think it’s interesting to talk about, so with that, I suppose we should just get into the blog.

Sam (04:01):
Let’s do it.

Maartje (04:10):
Before we get into the plot, I have some news for you. Our friends Lisa and Kristen, who make the Beb and Bob Collateral Damage Podcast, are up for an award. They are up to win a Lovie award. The Lovies are the European equivalent to the Webbies and they celebrate any type of internet creation.

From digital marketing to podcasts and more. And they are up for an award in the podcast category. The award they’re up for is Best Individual Episode. They are up against one other podcast, so they have a real shot at winning. And it is a people’s choice award, so your vote and ours can actually make a difference in whether they win or not.

Maartje (04:58):
In their episode, they tell a really unique personal story of World War II, and as you know, we’re pretty big fans of those.

Maartje (05:05):
So I would like to encourage you to help them out and give them your vote. You can do so at lovieawards.com by clicking on “Vote now,” going to the podcast category, and then finding Best Individual Episode. You do have to sign up to complete your vote, but it’s a really easy process and it would really help these two lovely independent creators

to win an award that they really deserve. Thank you for your time, and I will now take you back to our regularly scheduled episode.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (05:46):
It opens on the Russian roads somewhere behind German lines during Operation Barbarossa. It’s late 1942. Russian villagers look on helplessly as German soldiers destroy their food supply of potatoes in order to prompt the locals to flee and free up farmland. What do you mean by that, Sam?

Sam (06:04):
When the Germans pushed eastward, one of their big goals was Lebensraum, living space. And so

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (06:10):
Yes.

Sam (06:11):
if you start the work of removing people from their villages and from their farmland now, then you will be able to use that agricultural land for your own purposes.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (06:20):
And this way the villagers also don’t get to help any of the partisans. And it made me kind of sad to see the Germans taking all the cows. I was like, no, leave them alone.

Sam (06:31):
Yeah. We’ve talked about this before: in 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. Now this battle has been going on for a year and a half, and so the Germans are pretty deep into the Soviet Union at this point, and as we see, they are taking a lot out on the villagers. They view these people as subhuman in many ways, and so

they don’t really care about these people’s survival. And the way the Germans treated the Russian civilian population was a major reason why a lot of them ended up becoming partisans later on.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (07:05):
That makes sense. What is also so interesting about this opening is that it’s the only part of the movie where there’s a voiceover from one of the villagers talking about what they’re doing to the potatoes. That happens in the beginning and it doesn’t really happen again, which I thought was probably not even on purpose. It doesn’t seem to be a choice they stuck to. But it is a good opener, because otherwise I don’t think you would have understood specifically what was going on.

Sam (07:36):
Yeah, it almost gives it a sort of documentary feel, like these things that we are seeing really happened.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (07:41):
Yeah, so what they’re doing to the potatoes is dousing them in fuel or something stupid like that. And it seems kind of cruel to leave them out there but inedible.

Sam (07:53):
Yeah, exactly. A group of partisans ambush a unit of German soldiers, though the locals find little solace in this. So again, we are seeing that although there are these partisan movements fighting against the Germans behind the German lines, there isn’t necessarily universal support for this. And we’re introduced to Ivan Lakotkov, played by Rolan Bykov. He’s a lieutenant, and he’s going to be one of our main characters.

And he takes a shellacking from a local mother, played by Maya Bulgakova, who is all alone trying to feed two children during the Russian winter in a war zone. So you can imagine that she’s having a very difficult time, and she doesn’t really have time to support the partisans. She’s not this patriot who’s out there supporting the cause. She’s just thinking about her own survival.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (08:39):
She does then follow them, I believe, although we don’t see her again. But it’s interesting, because we see her trying to get all her stuff, which is not a lot, and then the kids, and she’s trying to close the shutters of her house, which then open again, and there’s a quite long shot of this abandoned house. And

there’s a couple of shots like this in this movie.

It reminded me a little bit of A Hidden Life, because there are these lingering shots of buildings in that film as well. Although not as much in the second half as in the first half. So it’s another stylistic choice that doesn’t really get pushed through to the end of the movie, but it caught my attention. I was almost like, why are we watching this house? But

I guess it’s meant to be this abandonment of civilization almost.

Sam (09:33):
Yeah, and this kind of massive displacement really tears at the cultural and social fabric, right? This

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (09:41):
Yes.

Sam (09:42):
this too is the first time that I’ve really noticed the incredible use of sound in this movie, when we see the shutter banging against the house and it’s kind of squeaking, and it’s just

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (09:51):
Yes.

Sam (09:51):
this very eerie sound.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (09:54):
It is very eerie. At the same time, I don’t know how this was for you, but I watched some of this movie with headphones on and the breathing sounds in this movie are intense.

Sam (10:06):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (10:06):
We also meet Alexander Lazarev, played by Vladimir Zamansky, who approaches a well for water in a deserted village, but he’s wearing a German uniform. He’s then captured by a young, wet-behind-the-ears partisan, and “captured” is a funny word to use because he

basically makes him capture him. And this wet-behind-the-ears partisan is Dmitri Mikta, played by Gennadi Yudin. It’s a funny little scene, because this actor, the younger one of the two,

is very insecure about capturing this guy in a German uniform. But yes, this is our deserter, more or less.

Sam (10:53):
Yeah, also one of our main characters. And here

again the sound: when Lazarev goes into the village, it’s totally quiet, almost like you’re underwater, and each noise is distinct. Like when he’s pulling

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (11:04):
Mm.

Sam (11:05):
the water up from the well, it’s super clear. It’s very eerie. I really like the soundscape.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (11:09):
There is also very little music in this. A lot of it is, like you said, very quiet. But they do use a score as well, but purposefully.

Sam (11:19):
Lazarev is supposedly based on a real individual, and it’s a little different from the film. This guy would infiltrate Russian collaborator groups and try to turn them back to the Russian side, but I wasn’t able to find too much information about him.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (11:32):
That’s a shame, because what a cool dude to talk about. Anyway, this actor also has the most distinctive-looking face I’ve ever seen. He’s got these really piercing eyes.

Sam (11:44):
Yeah, he does.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (11:45):
Which helps because we’re in black and white, so it helps that some of these people are really recognizable.

Sam (11:50):
Yeah, exactly. And they’re all bundled up and they’re all wearing hats and helmets, et cetera, as well, which never helps.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (11:55):
No.

Sam (11:56):
As Lazarev marches through the snow with the partisan group who took him captive, he tells the lieutenant about how he came to be in a German uniform. He had been a sergeant in the Red Army until, after ten days without food, his unit was surrounded by Germans, and when he surrendered, he agreed to put on a German uniform and fight for them.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (12:14):
Tell me some more about the POWs, please.

Sam (12:17):
Yeah. Several hundred thousand Soviet prisoners of war volunteered to fight for the Germans to avoid the notorious POW camps. We’ve talked about this before. On both sides of the Soviet-German conflict, prisoners of war were not treated well. Many of them died. So these men would have known when they were taken prisoner that if you didn’t volunteer to fight for the Germans, it was pretty likely that you would starve to death in a camp.

They were often used to counter Soviet partisan forces on the Eastern Front until late in 1943, when there was this scandal, I suppose. There was this perceived sense that if you had these Soviet forces fighting on the Eastern Front, they would desert, they would not be reliable, they would help the locals instead of fight for the Germans like they were supposed to. And so in late 1943, they were transferred to the Western Front instead, to limit their ability to fuck off or to not do their jobs. In late 1944, the Russians under German command were formed into a separate group under the command of captured Russian general Andrei Vlasov, and this was called the Russian Liberation Army. After the war, they were repatriated to the Soviet Union, where they were sent to special settlements or to the gulag, and the leadership was executed.

As you can probably guess, the Soviet Union did not tolerate people who switched sides particularly well. And the Germans had a name for these people. They called them a Hiwi, from the word Hilfswilliger, and it means “one willing to help.” This was how the Germans referred to auxiliary personnel recruited from occupied territories, particularly the Soviet Union, and we touched on these figures, who were much loathed and viewed as traitors by the local population, in our episode about Come and See.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (13:56):
Also a very good episode, so go listen to that one. The gulag, just for my information, is the prison, right?

Sam (14:03):
The gulags were, I guess you could call them, work camps up in Siberia, but typically

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (14:08):
Right.

Sam (14:09):
when you went to the gulag you did not come back.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (14:11):
It’s one of those.

Sam (14:12):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (14:13):
Lazarev is in prison in a hut along with another captive, a young auxiliary policeman, played by Nikolai Brilling, who’s terrified that he will be executed the following morning, and he also keeps telling Lazarev that he will be executed. Meanwhile we get more of a look at

an officer travelling with the partisans. His name is Major Petushkov, played by Anatoly Solonitsyn, who is bantering with the lieutenant. The major is a zealous man who hates taking prisoners. We will later discover that though he outranks the lieutenant, he does not really belong to their group, having been found separated from his own unit in the forest.

Sam (14:57):
Yeah, so oftentimes these partisan groups would be run by whoever was the highest-ranking Soviet officer that they happened to have. In this case, this major came on later, so he outranks our lieutenant, but our lieutenant, for all intents and purposes, is still in charge of these men.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (15:14):
He got there first.

Sam (15:15):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (15:15):
And the podcast episode that we listened to actually explains quite nicely how the chain of command in a partisan group would work. So if you want to learn more about that, go give them a listen. They’re quite good.

Sam (15:29):
A sentry waits in the fog. It’s very tense and creepy. Suddenly German soldiers appear and attack, and villagers begin to flee. It’s very chaotic. The partisans take the two prisoners out of their hut, and in the confusion the young auxiliary policeman escapes. Keep an eye on him, because we’ll see him again later. Lazarev makes no attempt to escape and asks the lieutenant for a rifle so that he can fight with them.

But the lieutenant doesn’t quite trust him yet, so instead he asks him for information about the German encampment nearby. He’s trying to figure out if it has any weak points, if maybe there’s a way to get in there.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (16:04):
The scene with the fog reminded me so much of Come and See. Come and See does this as well, where you don’t quite know how many of them there are because you can’t see them, and it’s terrifying.

Sam (16:17):
Yeah, and there’s just something about this setting, right? They’re in these Russian woods, and this whole area is something like two million square kilometers. It’s such a large area, very sparsely populated. It’s definitely somewhere that would be a little spooky.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (16:33):
And it works really well in black and white too, because obviously you’ve got the stark white snow and the men in black uniforms, well, they look black on the screen anyway, and it’s so effective and so terrifying.

Sam (16:47):
Yes.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (16:48):
Lazarev is given food and ends up in a little spat with a partisan named Viktor Solomon, played by Oleg Borisov, which a female partisan called Inga, played by Anna Zaitseva, attempts to prevent. The lieutenant visits a couple of soldiers and begins to explain his plan to infiltrate a German encampment, which is why he needed information from Lazarev.

He gives them additional food so that they can appear healthy like the German soldiers are, and they’re also telling hilarious Hitler jokes at this point.

Sam (17:20):
Yes, I really laughed out loud at the one about Hitler seeing a guy giving him the salute when no one else is giving the Nazi salute, so he tells the guy he’s going to give him a medal. And the guy says, no, I wasn’t doing the salute. I was just putting my arm up to show you how deep in shit you guys are on the Eastern Front.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (17:38):
I love a movie with some stabs here and there.

Sam (17:42):
Yes. The partisan movement in Russia goes back at least to Napoleon, when the French invaded Russia in the early nineteenth century. Then from there, after World War One, during the Russian Civil War, pretty much all sides had their own partisan movements.

And these are irregular fighters, right? So this is not a strictly formed military group. These are people who come together, maybe some of them are civilians, they’re not necessarily trained fighters, and there’s some guerrilla warfare going on. So this is not your typical army versus army type of fight. And in the late 1930s, Stalin had the bright idea to do a purge, and so a lot of these partisan fighters and leaders were executed.

And at the beginning of World War II, there were no major initial plans for a partisan movement. As you can imagine, if you know anything about Joseph Stalin, he didn’t like giving up control, and it’s very, very hard to control a large, loose collection of partisan groups. But due to the rapid pace of the German advance in 1941, many Soviet troops were cut off. And the Germans did not devote sufficient time and resources to securing areas they had already taken over.

Because this wasn’t really part of the plan, right? Their plan was to blitz into Russia as quickly as possible. And then behind them, they’re leaving these vast open spaces where there are hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops that are cut off from the main army. And of course, these people are not going to lay down their weapons. They are going to figure out a way to fight. And so the partisan movement was initially largely made up of Soviet troops. Locals joined up in larger numbers later.

Initially, they’re more focused on survival. There’s this very real sense of, what if the Germans win? We don’t want to make waves at this point, because we don’t know where the dice are going to fall here. But after, as we mentioned earlier, they witnessed the German treatment of the local population, a lot more civilians joined up. And then in 1942, the Soviet government acknowledged that okay, we have this partisan movement, we actually have to make use of it.

So they began funneling resources to it and providing instruction to the partisans. Due to the nature of partisan fighting, it’s difficult to say how many partisans fought for the Soviet Union. There are all kinds of numbers floating around online, but we can say probably anywhere from a couple hundred thousand up to eight hundred thousand partisans who fought the Germans. They played a major role in the German defeat on the Eastern Front. As you can imagine, it’s pretty tough to fight an army in front of you and also an army in the back. And

we saw a female Soviet partisan in this scene, which I thought was cool to include, because there were many female Soviet partisans as well. In Smolensk, for example, there was actually an all-female recon brigade. And we’ve talked about this before: in the actual Red Army itself, around 5% of the people enlisted were women. And so it was cool to see that they acknowledged the involvement of women in this movie. And many women who were not partisans officially

also put themselves in danger to support and cooperate with the partisan movement, so sheltering people, giving them food, that kind of stuff.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (20:38):
And the lady in this one, Inga, they also make a point of telling you how smart she is. She’s got an education and she speaks a little German. I like that about this movie, and it reminded me a little bit of Enemy at the Gates, but this seems much more real to me.

Sam (20:57):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (20:58):
So yeah, I thought it was cool that they made a point

to let the men tell other men that this woman is smart.

Sam (21:05):
Yeah. We discover that Inga and Solomon are lovers. There’s a cute little scene where she says, we should get married. And he says, but I’m a womanizer. And she says, yeah, you also can’t kiss. To

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (21:16):
Whoa!

Sam (21:17):
crack me up. Solomon is then given the task of taking Lazarev on a small mission to test his loyalties. So Lazarev is given a gun, and then they’re waiting by this deserted road.

And he has to take out a motorcycle with two Germans on it as it comes up the road. He does this, and then he, Solomon, and a third partisan named Arefich, played by Fyodor Odinokov, make the motorcycle into an IED that then explodes when a subsequent German patrol comes down the road. So yeah, definitely some guerrilla stuff here.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (21:50):
This is a very long fight scene that I enjoyed. It’s quite tense, and I have to say I’ve never seen a German soldier wearing those kinds of goggles.

The partisans capture another motorcycle and a car, but Solomon is shot by a German whom they believed to be dead. They shot him down, but he’s still alive. And then Solomon is shot. Lazarev guns the soldier down, but it’s too late for poor Solomon, who apologizes for initiating the fight with Lazarev before he dies. Earlier he’d been sort of harassing him almost, and as he’s dying he tells him that he’s sorry for that. And back at the camp, the major questions Arefich, coming to the conclusion that Lazarev must have been the one to have shot Solomon, which is not true. Leave him alone.

Sam (22:41):
Yes. And as we said, this major hates taking prisoners. He doesn’t trust anyone who collaborates. He’s very black and white. You’re a good guy or a bad guy. And the movie definitely positions him as not the hero here. The guy who’s really probably the protagonist of the movie is the lieutenant, who understands that even though Lazarev did collaborate,

now he’s trying to make good, and they really need to make use of all the manpower and all the opportunities that they have.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (23:10):
Yes, I do think they do a clever thing where they make Lazarev slightly aloof, so you’re not quite sure what his true motivations are. I thought, especially in the beginning, you can question him a little bit. And that’s good, because you need tension for it to remain interesting. I thought that was good.

Sam (23:30):
The partisans are supposed to blow up a bridge as a train passes over, but they hesitate because there’s a boat full of Russian prisoners passing below. And I thought this was one of the coolest shots of the movie, where you are super zoomed in on this group of Russian prisoners. They’re so still that it almost looks like a photograph, and then it zooms out and you see how many of them are on this boat. And the major is furious about this, because

he’s like, we’re devoted to the cause, it doesn’t matter about human lives. And so they do end up blowing up the bridge, but they wait until the boat has safely passed.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (24:03):
And I think they were trying to blow up a train with ammunition on it or something, right? As well. We’re just

Sam (24:09):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (24:10):
yeah. I get the feeling that none of them really like the major.

Sam (24:14):
Yeah, he’s an outsider, first of all, and he hasn’t really integrated himself into their group particularly, and he’s kind of a dick.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (24:22):
Yes, he is. He’s not very comradely, I would say.

Inga finishes burying Solomon as Lazarev looks on, and he tries to explain to her how the war has disrupted their lives in good ways and bad, but much of what has happened to each is chance. So they’re like, we’re just in this war, we’re just pawns, and it’s just happening to us. The major has Lazarev arrested for Solomon’s death. That evening,

Lazarev attempts to hang himself, but he’s unsuccessful, thankfully for the movie. The lieutenant tells him that he’s not getting out of this that easily and he will be joining the infiltration team that is going to the German encampment.

The goal is to redirect a German supply train, since the partisans are running out of food. Which makes sense, right? They’re in this huge wasteland of snow and nothing else, so they are hungry as hell.

Sam (25:18):
Yeah, definitely. And the Russian winter is notoriously one of the things that hampered the German supply chain as well. So no one is doing well here.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (25:27):
I didn’t really catch on when I was watching that Lazarev tried to commit suicide. I had somehow thought that they tried to hang him for Solomon’s murder. But it makes sense now, because he’s crying a bunch afterwards, so yeah, that makes more sense.

Sam (25:43):
Yeah, they say something about how he tried to hang himself with his belt, but the belt was shoddy, so it broke.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (25:49):
Shoddy German belt.

Sam (25:50):
Yeah.

Four partisans, including Lazarev, disguise themselves as German soldiers and sneak into the camp. It’s pretty easy, honestly. They just get into a truck and they drive on in there in their German uniforms. Obviously, the people in there probably recognize Lazarev. He’s a familiar face. The other three partisans go to board the supply train that they’re going to redirect, while Lazarev distracts a guard in the watchtower. This is someone that he knows.

This is also a Russian collaborator, someone who had been a Russian soldier but was captured and forced to work for the Germans. Unfortunately, the young auxiliary policeman from earlier, who had escaped from the partisans, recognizes Inga and raises the alarm.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (26:29):
Nooo, stop it! Ha, that’s my contribution to this note.

Sam (26:35):
I love that they let Inga go on this little mission.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (26:38):
Right. She looks so courageous and dapper. She looks better than any of them.

Sam (26:43):
Yeah, she does.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (26:44):
Lazarev takes out the guard in the tower that he knows. It’s fairly easy for him to do, and then he uses his gun to shoot the auxiliary policeman and the other German soldiers as they come running. The other partisans are able to make their escape on the train. Lazarev was initially, of course, supposed to join them, but he remains behind to continue to draw fire from the Germans and to prevent them from stopping the train.

And this is no wonder, because the Germans are literally everywhere all of a sudden. Lazarev is ultimately shot, and though he makes it out of the guard tower, he collapses before he can reach the departing train. Well.

Sam (27:23):
Yes, so he redeems himself, but ultimately, as we’ve learned, war tends to be futile and pointless a lot of the time, and he doesn’t get his

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (27:31):
Yes.

Sam (27:33):
happy ending.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (27:33):
Indeed.

Sam (27:34):
Toward the end of the war, this is a little forward in time, of course, the Russians march victoriously through a German city, and we see that our lieutenant has survived. He is now a veteran of many successful campaigns. A young colonel runs up to him and they have a little drink together, and he talks about how he busted so many troops out of encirclement, but he’s still a soldier’s soldier.

The last shot of the movie is of him helping his men push a truck that isn’t working along with the rest of the convoy.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (28:03):
Yeah, I really like the lieutenant. Give me more lieutenant, please.

Sam (28:07):
Yeah, he survives, and we know that he is a good leader of men, that the people who work under him respect him. And in so much as there is a hero in this movie, it’s probably this guy, because he gets his guys through the war as well as he possibly can. But he’s also the one who is willing to give Lazarev the benefit of the doubt, and I think that was one of the things that

the Soviet censorship board didn’t like so much, because if collaborators are returning from the war and being executed by the government, it’s pretty obvious how the Soviet state feels about people who change sides. And this lieutenant was more willing to say, yeah, I can see the situation that you were in. You didn’t have much choice, and here’s an opportunity to redeem yourself.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (28:51):
And then he does get to redeem himself, and he also dies having helped the mission that they’re on, so there’s no way for him to then unredeem himself anymore either. He just dies and he’s redeemed. So yeah.

Sam (29:05):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (29:05):
I do think it’s a shame we don’t get to see Inga anymore, but you can’t have it all, I guess.

Sam (29:11):
Well, she rode victoriously back with that train and distributed the food, one assumes, and I’m going to imagine she lived happily ever after.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (29:18):
She probably ate a sandwich.

Sam (29:19):
Yeah, honestly, they all looked like they could use a sandwich or two.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (29:23):
That is the end of the movie. It’s not a very long one.

Sam (29:27):
No, it’s not. But honestly, considering there are so many incredible shots of the Russian countryside and just the state of affairs in which these people find themselves, considering how good it is at building atmosphere and stuff, it is pretty action-packed. There are always things going on. And so you get to the end of the movie and you’re like, that’s it, huh? Okay.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (29:49):
And there wasn’t even an opening card and there wasn’t an end card, so I was like, this is so not Hollywood.

Sam (29:55):
I know, I love watching these Soviet movies because they’re so different. This movie would not be made in this way in the West. It just wouldn’t be.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (30:03):
No, I am glad that I’d seen a couple of other movies like this before and that I now know quite a bit about the war in general, because you don’t get a whole lot of information. You’d have to figure that out yourself a bit. They don’t treat you like a stupid audience, but sometimes Hollywood does, quite a bit, so it’s quite nice.

Sam (30:25):
Yeah, for sure. They assume you have a lot of context.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (30:28):
Yeah, so if you do want context, like we said, go listen to the podcast. It sets you up nicely.

This is going to be a short episode, Sam.

Sam (30:38):
Yep.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (30:38):
Time to rate this movie, but before we do, I would like to remind you that you can follow us wherever you get your podcasts and you can send this episode to a friend.

Sam (30:49):
Every time you send an episode to a friend, a cool, kick-ass lady partisan gets to eat a sandwich.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (30:53):
Yes, yes, yes. So do send it to a friend, because I feel like many of our friends have not seen movies like this and they should watch those. Anyway, what should we rate it?

Sam (31:06):
We could rate it soups in the face out of ten, because of when Viktor slaps Lazarev’s soup into his face.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (31:13):
I forgot about that scene. That’s a funny scene. Let’s do it. How many soups in the face out of ten would you rate this movie?

Sam (31:22):
I’ll give it eight soups in the face out of ten. I think it’s really well put together, it’s really well shot. It was super interesting to me, not just as a depiction of events on the Eastern Front, which I’m always saying I would like to know more about, but also as a piece of history in its own right. The fact that it was banned in the Soviet Union because these themes were viewed as anti-nationalistic.

And how that points to how the Soviet Union in particular used these partisan movements as such a prominent part of the national memory and of building a Soviet identity around it, and how they couldn’t allow movies that might question that even a little bit to be viewed by the public. And then how this movie did come out in the 80s, when there was this loosening of

rules around censorship and there were these economic reforms. We’re approaching the end of the Soviet Union in 1986. And so even just from that perspective, it’s a super interesting movie to watch. I thought it was just a really interesting story, and I would recommend that people watch it. What about you?

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (32:31):
I will give it seven soups in the face out of ten. I struggled maybe a little bit with the story in the first half and I maybe didn’t feel as equipped to understand what was going on. I do however think that if I were to watch it again, it would make more sense to me in the beginning. I thought the acting was good.

You mentioned the sound design before and I think that’s really good. The soundscape is good. And all the reasons you said also apply to my rating, just slightly less. So yeah.

Sam (33:04):
Yeah.

It’s a cool blend of art movie and action movie.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (33:08):
Yeah, it would definitely be an arthouse film if you were to watch it in a cinema.

But yes, there’s also some cool shooting of Germans. And there’s not any blood, is there? I don’t think there’s any blood in this movie.

Sam (33:21):
A little bit. Like the German that they thought was dead but wasn’t, he had some on his face and stuff like that.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (33:26):
That’s true, but I didn’t see anyone else that brutally bloody from anything. But that’s fine. It’s really effective either way, so yeah. Go watch it

Sam (33:37):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (33:38):
for a different perspective.

Sam (33:40):
That’s actually kind of an interesting topic in its own right, this idea of whether war movies have to depict really in-your-face, almost pornographic violence to get the point across. And I think this movie would argue that you don’t.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (33:53):
I think I would agree with it. For me it makes it slightly easier to watch even, and it makes me less likely to think this is just another guy’s movie. If there’s less gore, I just find it easier to focus on the actual story that’s being told. So yay.

Sam (34:15):
Yeah, even the part where Lazarev is gunning down Germans from the tower in this sort of Rambo-esque moment, the point is not all of these Germans being gunned down. We’re focused mostly on Lazarev, and this is his moment and the completion of his arc as a character. That’s what’s more

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (34:33):
Yes.

Sam (34:34):
important.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (34:34):
Yes. And I’m trying to remember if we’ve seen many other movies with as little blood as this one.

Sam (34:42):
I think for sure Son of Saul, for example, is a movie about the Holocaust, one of the most violent incidents in history, and you don’t really see the violence foregrounded at all.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (34:54):
No,

but it’s so heavily implied that it’s probably more effective than if they would have shown it. And I guess what this movie doesn’t do, and what Son of Saul does do, is that this one doesn’t give me chills in the same way Son of Saul does, but I don’t think it’s meant to do any of that, so that makes sense.

Sam (35:15):
Yeah.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (35:15):
Anyway, are you reading anything?

Sam (35:17):
I am. Speaking of the Holocaust, I am reading Night by Elie Wiesel, who is a very famous Holocaust survivor. He wrote several books about the Holocaust, and this is, I believe, the first one that he wrote. It’s his memoir. He won a Nobel Peace Prize. The book is very short. It’s just over a hundred pages long. And it was translated into English by his wife, I believe. So

I’m not that far in, I’m a chapter or two in, but it’s a very famous book. I’m excited to read the rest.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (35:47):
What made you pick that up?

Sam (35:49):
I was buying books on the ThriftBooks website that I use, and it was cheap and I was already paying for shipping, so I thought I’d throw it in there.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (35:59):
The best kind of book, an accidental

Sam (36:01):
Yes.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (36:01):
book.

Sam (36:02):
Yes.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (36:02):
I don’t think I’m reading anything new. Oh, yes I am. I’m reading something new. I’m still reading all the books I was reading last week, but I’m also reading I Who Have Never Known Men. It’s a dystopian book about these women that are locked in a cage underground and have never seen a man. And it’s hard to tell what it’s about. I think it’s more

philosophical than heavy. But it’s interesting.

Sam (36:30):
I’m like, dystopian? That sounds great.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (36:33):
So yeah. Still reading, still going, just not as much as last week. Anyway, I guess I will go ahead and lead us out. I would like to thank everybody for listening to yet another episode of Rosie. You can follow us wherever you get your podcasts, or rate us five stars or leave us a review, and we’ll read it out loud if you post it. And you can follow us on Instagram at rosiethereviewerpodcast, or you can visit our website, rosiethereviewer.com, where you can rate this movie and where I will also put the podcast that we listened to. So in case you need more podcasts, you can go listen to someone else’s for a change. We’ll see you next week.

Sam (37:17):
See you next week.

Maartje | Rosie the Reviewer (37:17):
Bye.