War Without Peace

“Is it possible that man’s heart can harbor, amid such ravishing natural beauty, feelings of hatred, vengeance, or the desire  to destroy

his fellows?”

- The Raid,

Lev Tolstoy (1853)

By the use of gaudy images of human tragedy amidst ‘ravishing natural beauty’ director Sergei Bodrov’s new film A Prisoner of the Caucasus masterfully brings to life Tolstoy’s classic short story of the same name.

Tolstoy’s plot was based upon his experiences while serving with the Russian Army in the Caucasus, from 1851-54, as the Russian Crown fought to bring into the Empire a rebellious native force. Tolstoy’s tales of military service were his first introduction to the patriotic Russian censor, which gravely disagreed with his ambivalent portrayal of Russia’s military presence. Tolstoy raised the censor’s ire with his radical representation of the Tartar and Muslim ‘hordes,’ suggesting that they were anything other than bloodthirsty and sub-human. Whereas many other Russian writers had fought bravely in those wars, turning their battle experiences into print useful for propaganda, Tolstoy’s service caused him to thoroughly question the very nature of the war.

Bodrov seems to share Tolstoy’s uncompromising artistic vision – his film does not avoid showing the bleak underbelly of life in an occupied country -- and, possibly, Tolstoy would have appreciated Bodrov’s sensitive adaptation. Bodrov has the courage of his moral convictions  and he never hesitates to reiterate the anti-war message at the heart of his tale of courage, kindness and cowardice in time of war. At the center of this film, amid all the blood and suffering, lies the image of a winsome toy bird. The bird hangs dismally in a young girl’s window, unable to escape on its wooden wings all the surrounding human loss. But the bird itself is an act of hope. And perhaps that, finally, is the gift Bodrov wants his audience to take away with them: a toy bird, unable to fly, but longing for freedom.

During a seemingly endless war in the Caucasus for domination over indigenous self-determination, two Russian soldiers on patrol are overpowered and taken prisoner. Oleg Menshikov, fresh from his success as the depraved NKVD officer in Nikita Mikhalkov’s Burnt By The Sun,  gives a strong performance as the malicious and dissolute patrol commander Sasha. His Sasha is the morally weary heir of Russian literature’s traditional anti-hero, spanning all the way back to Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin: Sasha lives carelessly, shielding himself from a coarse reality with drink and random violence. Cynical and arrogant, he takes out his frustration on his fellow-prisoner, Private Ivan Zhilin, but it is eventually he and not Ivan who breaks down in the face of their predicament.

Zhilin is an excellently rendered cross-section of contemporary Russia. A young, raw recruit, his mother’s only son, his father gone or never there, Ivan represents Russian youth in the cross-fire of an older generation’s greedy desire to retain the stolen treasure of a mutilated empire. Compellingly acted by Sergei Bodrov, Jr., Ivan is a very likable figure to those he comes into contact with, whether writing letters home to his mother, or making toys in the hope of winning over his kidnapper’s daughter, Dina (Susanna Mekhraliyeva). Dina, far older than her years, stands out as the voice of reason in a world of brute force. She is one of the few products of her environment who is able to see beyond the next killing to the end of humanity. As her brother sits in a Russian prison, and her father glumly savors his hatred, Dina  recognizes a kinship with the prisoners and does what she can to soften their lot.

Their captor, the Tartar Abdul-Murat (Jemal Sikharulidze), plans to trade his prisoners for his son’s freedom. He forces Sasha and Ivan to write home, asking their families to come to the Caucasus and motivate the Russian officers to allow a prisoner exchange. He shackles Ivan and Sasha together and threatens them with death if their families do not arrive quickly. But his cruelty to his prisoners is mitigated by his kindness to his daughter Dina, who receives the full power of his love.

In the meantime, waiting for liberation or death, Sasha and Ivan remain chained in Abdul-Murat’s barn, witnessing the rhythms of daily, provincial Caucasian life. Upon a backdrop of breath-taking Caucasian splendor,  whose beauty is emphasized by the war’s shabby spectacle, Sasha and Ivan spend their long days drinking and getting personally acquainted with the victims of their government’s avarice: prisoners, peasants and rebels.

Murder, as both cause and effect, plays an important role in Bodrov’s narrative. Sasha’s throat is slit, his death taking the part of the mare’s in Tolstoy’s version, and the viewer is left to wonder if human life has come to resemble that of animals.

In this killing atmosphere, what fate awaits Ivan? Near the end, as Ivan is led off by Abdul-Murat through the local cemetery to their final encounter, and the corpses of local boys stain the earth, the Russian Major consoles Ivan’s mother with the promise that “we will revenge our sons” and sends out the bomber planes, thus creating new cycles of war and hate.

A Prisoner of the Caucasus’ powerful emotional impact is due to its ability to locate itself, by a variety of subconscious  images, within Russia’s psyche. Bodrov’s allusion to Russia’s conflict in Chechnya is immediate and effective: the figures of Ivan and Sasha become representative of all those who served and died; Russian boys sent to a exotic land for an incomprehensible and exhaustive war. Ivan’s mother, in her search to rescue Ivan, calls forth the memory of all those soldiers’ mothers who ignored the military’s false assurances and brought their besieged sons home from foreign battlefields.

The war in Chechnya has had a devastating effect upon Russia, enforcing an imploding state where death is hard currency and life is cheap, is depicted in the film by Russian soldiers trading firearms for vodka. The viewer is reminded of newspaper articles showing starving Russian soldiers begging for bread and cigarettes by the roadside, selling guns for liquor, abandoned by their commanding officers. Another feature of the film also has a modern reference point Ñ the regular and humiliating document checks that Abdul-Murat must submit to in order to enter the town are reminiscent of the frequent searches any person from the Caucasus can expect to go through in cities throughout the whole of Russia.

Bodrov has re-interpreted Tolstoy's legendary text to reflect the contemporary decay of a war-torn society, while simultaneously showing that very little has changed from the 1850s. Bodrov's film therefore becomes a circular cry of crime and revenge; though some characters can see beyond their own pain to the fate of many, no one is strong enough to escape the circle.