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Reviewed by Glenn Erickson
A gargantuan version of Tolstoy’s national epic, approached as a priority as important as the Soviet
space program, War and Peace is surely the biggest production
ever put on film, with entire armies filling the screen and covering vast landscapes. The recreation
of the Napoleonic era in St. Petersburg and Moscow is a wonderment. Director Sergei Bondarchuk
makes the story work even better at the intimate level. The romantic adventures and heartbreaks
of the story’s central trio, Pierre, Natasha and Andrei lead to at least 4 or 5 devastatingly
emotional highpoints.
Previously, there was the 1956
Dino DeLaurentiis version. Except for
some awkward casting, it wasn’t half bad, but it pales beside the opulence and scope of this colossus.
Ruscico’s version is both longer and better-presented than previous releases, and Image has packaged
it with helpful extras and easily-navigated menus. More on that below.
Synopsis (spoiler-laden):
Film 1: Andrei Bolkonsky, parts one and two (140 minutes): The sweeping story of
Russian nobility during the Napoleonic wars starts in 1805. At the Moscow Rostovs, young Natasha
(Lyudmila Savelyeva) is a child dreaming of romantic affairs. Frequent guest Pierre Bezukhov
(Sergei Bondarchuk, the director) takes a serious liking to her. Russia allies with Austria against
Napoleon, and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov) parks his pregnant wife in the country
with his father and sister, while he goes to fight. For Natasha’s brother Nikolai it is a first
battle. Back in Moscow,
Pierre is easily pressured into marriage with the beautiful but decadent Hélène,
who is soon rumored to be taking lovers. Pierre challenges one of them to a duel, and has
a crisis of conscience after wounding the man severely. Andrei returns to his country home just in
time to see his wife die in childbirth. He determines that life is worthless
until Spring comes and
the world seems to be reborn.
Film 2: Natasha Rostova (93 minutes): At a glorious ball, Natasha is a wallflower until
the meek Pierre encourages Andrei to dance with her, whereupon both fall gloriously in love. Andrei
carefully proposes through her family, electing to wait a year before marriage. A year seems like
forever to the still-immature Natasha. She goes on a wolf hunt and to the opera,
where, with the connivance of Hélène, young wastrel Kuraghin catches
her eye. Falling in love, and not realizing what will happen, Natasha agrees to elope with
the scoundrel, a fate barely avoided by the intervention of her sister and Pierre. Andrei breaks off
their engagement,
and Natasha believes her life to be over at age 17.
Film 3: 1812 (78 minutes): A new invasion of Russia is undertaken by Napoleon, and Andrei
once again takes up his sword. His father remains in denial as the French advance steadily
across Western Russia.
Pierre takes leave of Natasha to go observe the big battle at Borodino, and speaks to Andrei the night before.
The battle is an enormous clash of thousands of troops, and at the end the French prevail. Andrei
is
seriously wounded.
Film 4: Pierre Bezukhov (92 minutes) The main Russian general realizes he can’t stop
the French, and so elects to abandon Moscow without a fight, burning all useful resources on the way.
Millions become refugees, and the rich of Moscow flee East. Pierre disguises himself as a common
citizen with the vain idea of taking personal revenge on the invaders, but instead makes friends with
a French
officer who moves into his apartment. The Russians refuse to parlay with Napoleon, and leave him in
a dead city with the poor. His soldiers loot tons of booty they can’t possibly carry
home. Pierre is arrested as an arsonist but is spared the death penalty. He witnesses a mass execution
and is sent on a march by the French. On the
refugee trail East, the Rostovs take in the mortally wounded Andrei, and he and Natasha spend time
together declaring their love. When Napoleon quits the city, the Russian winter closes in to decimate
his army as they withdraw. Pierre and Natasha are reunited.
Savant was excited to see this pricey-but-exceptional DVD release; Ruscico has a reputation for
quality releases of hard-to-see Soviet pictures, and War and Peace is certainly the prize
title, at least for Western audiences unfamiliar with the majority of Mosfilm’s output. I saw the
American release when 16 years old, serialized over two weeks in a fancy theater in San Bernardino.
I can’t say I followed the story well, and mostly remember the grainy, washed out picture and
the distracting English dubbing - Natasha’s voice squeaked like Minnie Mouse. But the eye-popping
visuals stayed burned into my memory, especially a God’s eye view, receding into the heavens, of the
Austerlitz battlefield spread out below. It looked as if it took in miles of smoke and fighting.
In Russian with subs in a number of languages, the new Ruscico / Image DVD is a completely different viewing
experience. 1
The Russian voices are beautiful, and it’s easy to catch cultural things we had only
read about, such as the St. Petersburg elite opting to speak French for many conversational details.
It’s not 70mm, but on a big widescreen television, the scope of the visuals can be almost
overwhelming.
Director Bondarchuk makes a brooding, introverted Pierre, too shy to dance at a ball and easily
convinced of his insignificance, even as he’s inheriting a massive estate. His adoration of
Natasha is matched only by his belief that he’s unworthy of her. He makes an excellent foil for the
dashing, closed-minded Prince Andrei, a traditionalist who chides Pierre for his scandalous
associations, But Andrei boorishly persecutes his own loving wife because he feels tied down by
family obligations. Both men evolve very interestingly through the story, experiencing the tumultuous
events and their mutual love of Natasha from different perspectives.
Lyudmila Savelyeva is radiant as Natasha, starting as a pixie dreaming girlish dreams and bursting
with childish enthusiasm. Her miniature features and expressive eyes are a depthless
repository of feminine romanticism. Besides the big ball, she performs a show-stopping
folk dance at her Uncle’s place in the country. Clearly meant to be the soul of everything precious
in Russia, the character is a big success.
Bondarchuk had resources to dwarf American epics, but all of War and Peace is
sublimated to a cinematic vision, even the large battle scenes. If there’s any doubt this is a
classic Russian movie, it goes away with the entrance of Natasha, bursting through some doors in
three Potemkinish cascading short cuts that end on her beaming face. The camera stays put
when it’s proper to do so, but when the director has something to express, it trucks and pans and
cranes and tilts, and seemingly flies through the air. The big ballroom dance dissolves into West
Side Story- like blurs and soft colors, and then the camera whips around in dizzying waltz
circles, or flies down the hall
watching the dancers from on high. Bondarchuk introduces little choreographed cuts by flashing a
fan in front of the camera, a device that is unusually successful. The only ’showoff’ trick that
didn’t work for Savant was a later tense scene where the director inserts subliminal flash frames at
every cut point … it just seemed distracting.
When the story is taken over by author Tolstoy’s abstract thoughts, the characters often look for
answers in the sky, and Bondarchuk will often accompany disembodied speeches with aerial shots of
clouds and vast landscapes, such as seen in the main titles. These provide an endistancing break
from the melodrama on the ground. The high aerial shots are always at a conceptual
remove from the narrative, so that we don’t get the feeling that the 1812 era is being hyped with
visuals alien to the historical experience.
Bondarchuk was criticized by some reviewers in 1967 for his eclecticism; in one scene he might have
split screens that seem to come from Pillow Talk, and multi-imaged superimpositions that
evoke Metropolis. There is an Abel Gance tendency toward camera gymnastics, but most of the
film is visually straightforward. Bondarchuk is a classicist who makes the camera do some of the
acting, and the result is by and large a big success.
I mentioned the 4 or 5 emotional high-points of the picture, most of which are heavy-duty dramatic
scenes - Natasha’s hysteria at having her elopement foiled, Pierre’s witnessing of the firing
squads, the death of Andrei’s young wife. In a Western film, we might expect the music to play a
larger role in dictating the tone of the drama; most Hollywood epics lean heavily on their scores for
their emotional telegraphy. War and Peace builds its emotional climaxes mostly through
unadorned theatrics, and giant closeups. But its battle scenes, the extended battle of Borodino,
especially, have an impact that I don’t think I’ve seen in any other epic.
Savant loves giant battle scenes and always admires the huge organizational patterns of masses of
people moving in concert for the camera. Knowing how difficult it is to get just one actor to open
one door and not look false, the moving panoramas of soldiers and organized mayhem in shows
like Zulu Dawn are impressive displays of movies as a giant engine of movement. War and Peace
outdoes them all for sheer vastness of
scale and precision of effect. The gigantic computer-animated battles in The Two Towers are
impressive, but this is 100% real - and there’s no substitute for the suspension of disbelief
provided by real armies clashing on a real battlefield.
What we get is a poetic representation of the chaos of warfare, not a layout of strategies we
can read or follow as a story. The overall image is of total insanity, the energies and lives
of tens of thousands of men destroyed in armed conflict. A master shot
might have a crane or a dolly or start with a wide shot and end up on a detail. In many masters it
looks as though tens of thousands of soldiers and horses are rushing every which way, marching in
set patterns. There are some shots of massed diamond-shape formations moving across the landscape,
like a carpet of men. The longer it goes on, the more elaborate it gets.
Bondarchuk’s experts use smoke as a choreographed element. As plumes of cannon-hits are seen erupting
from the foreground to what might be a mile away, the wind carries clouds of black and white smoke
across the screen in patterns that accentuate the blind chaos of what it must meant to be in this
kind of a fight. Bright sunshine turns to dark shadow and back again as the smoke ebbs and flows.
Nobody has the big picture of this struggle, not even the commanders, who sit helplessly while their
rigid battle plans collapse around them. The rules of combat put ceremony before the lives of the
soldiers; Andrei’s company waits in reserve, but loses a third of its men to shelling, as they stand
in their formal lines.
When Bondarchuk decides to move his camera through the melee, we get perhaps ten unbroken minutes of
continuous amazement. Hundreds of cavalrymen charge a small hill. A long line of horsemen on that
hill disperse to reveal cannon that all fire at once - the camera whips left to see the entire
wave of enemy horses tumble to the ground. Cameras on rails truck past men climbing ladders and
stairs, and race down trenches as dozens of horses leap overhead. It’s like a battle for the end of the
world, and the pacing and emphasis is flawless. One overhead wide angle view, rushing downward over
the heads of soldiers fighting hand-to-hand makes the viewer feel like a cannonball crashing to Earth.
Ruscico’s DVD of War and Peace is handsomely presented on 4 discs in a thankfully
easy-to-understand
package. The transfer image isn’t going to be able to compete with restorations done here, however.
War and Peace was shot in a Soviet color system in 70mm, and the colors are a muted set of
pastels we aren’t used to. Either the age of the elements, or the reduction printing, or
bad storage has given many scenes a dupey look, with slightly fluctuating contrast. The image
is stable and intact, but there are occasional scratches and slight damage.
The encoding is also not top-end. Battle scenes with the choreographed smoke usually look fine, but
occasional images have artifacting, the kind of image popping when details don’t update with every
frame. When Andrei is wounded, the camera swoops up to give a view of the whole valley, and the
artifacting makes a mess of the foliage as it pans by.
Either that one bad shot was an isolated instance, or most of the time we’re too caught up in the story to
notice such things. I should
point out that I viewed the discs on a 65″ monitor that magnifies these kinds of flaws, so many
viewers will probably be completely unaware of them.
The DVD producers have included a generous allotment of extras, listed below. A fifth disc contains
a couple of Soviet docus on Tolstoy and an elaborate commemorative behind-the-scenes piece. It
starts with the stars at a Moscow premiere, and then backtracks to show how many scenes were filmed.
The cameraman is on roller skates in the ballroom scene, and a trucking scene through the battlefield
shows exactly how some of the more amazing shots were captured. The cameramen use portable 70mm
cameras of a kind I’ve never seen, that look every bit as sophisticated as ours.
The docus from the 60s show how far apart Russia and America were at the height of the Cold War
competition.
A Tolstoy piece ends with one of the author’s statements about freedom, and the Russian editors
show anti-war riots in the West, as if the only suppression of human rights were happening on
our side of the Iron Curtain. A shot of a protester’s American flag with a skull on it is
prominently displayed. The narration stresses collective action, with ‘comrade’ this, and ‘comrade’ that
heard; the stars’ names go mostly unmentioned.
In one of the interviews, the President of the Mosfilm studio says that after the years of filming,
War and Peace wasn’t unanimously praised in the Soviet Union. Everybody saw it, but not
everyone thought it was a masterpiece. Audiences are audiences, Russian or American, and after
those 4 or 5 transcendant moments in the picture, the ending does seem rather downplayed and
anti-climactic. But seeing the show now after 35 more years of film history, this enormous epic seems
more of an accomplishment than ever.
On a scale of Excellent, Good, Fair, and Poor,
War and Peace rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Good
Sound: Very good
Supplements: 5-disc set, Behind-the-scenes featurette, Interviews with actors Irina
Skobtseva and Vassily Lanovoy, cinematographer Anatoly Petritsky, composer Vycheslav
Ovchinnikov, and Mosfilm Studios president Karen Shakhnazarov, Leo Tolstoy documentary,
Art direction and set design studies, Cast and crew filmographies
Packaging: double folding plastic and paper cases in card sleeve.
Reviewed: April 27, 2003
Footnote:
1. There’s an English
dubbed track as well, but I’m told that it reverts to un-subtitled Russian here and there. This
makes sense
if the information is true that the movie was cut by 45 minutes for Western release: the
un-dubbed scenes are probably the ones cut upon export. Hopefully those who care enough to seek out
this disc will listen to it in its fascinating original Russian track anyway.
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DVD Savant Text © Copyright 2003 Glenn Erickson
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