Ballad of a Soldier (1959, Grigori Chukhrai) (Patreon)

56/100

Settled in for some harrowing combat and was surprised to instead get Before Sunrise: Soviet WWII Edition. While these lovers will definitely not be meeting again seven years later—much of the film's poignance derives from its up-front reveal that Alyosha will be killed at the front not long after he makes this last trip home—there's a similarly charming, rapid-fire progression from chance encounter to lifelong soulmates, even if "lifelong" here means a matter of days or weeks. (Will Shura ever even learn that he died? Quite possibly not.) Oddly, though, Chukhrai winds up treating this relationship as something of a digression, even after devoting most of the movie to it; his desire to pay tribute to the Russian war dead, with Alyosha serving merely as a representative example, requires landing on a mother's final embrace of her son, so that it plays more like Losing Private Ryanovsky. That also explains the overkill of having Alyosha rescue children from a burning train wreck toward the end—not showing his death was a savvy choice, but Chukhrai still wants to ensure that he's perceived as heroic, since he's Everysoldier. That tug of war between specificity and generalization hampers what might otherwise have been a remarkably pure love story, with war as the tragic element; even the scene in which Alyosha discovers that the soldier's wife to whom he's been tasked with delivering bars of soap has taken up with another man seems torn between acknowledging wartime sacrifices and foregrounding the young lovers' indignation. When those two fresh-faced kids are together onscreen, though, it's hard not to smile.