We’ve previously seen the work of Mikhail Kalatozov in The Cranes are Flying. This is his follow-up to that celebrated film and once again it stars Tatiana Samoilova as the female lead. I expected to be another war era film but instead it’s a survival adventure that feels surprisingly modern. It pits the four explorers against the unrelenting power of nature and it’s the more terrifying because you know for a fact that it must be real. I don’t know how much of the forest they had to set on fire to film that scene. It does however have a jingoistic vibe that feels jarring to our sensibilities.
A plane drops off a team of four geologists and guides into a boreal forest in Siberia. Their mission is to search for diamond deposits in an area where the geology resembles that of South Africa. The team consists of two younger geologists Andrei and Tanya who are a couple, and two older men Sergei and Konstantin. The latter is married and spends his free time writing a letter to his wife about his experiences. After spending some time together, Sergei expresses his love for Tanya despite knowing that she is already with Andrei, causing tension between them. The group grows dispirited as they keep failing to find any diamonds but then Tanya spots diamonds while excavating a hillside. They celebrate the discovery, radio their success to their home base and make preparations to leave. In the middle of the night, they are awakened by a fire that seems to have engulfed the forest. While attempting to retrieve supplies from their canoe, Sergei is struck of a falling tree and killed. On the radio they are able to receive transmissions but their own signals outwards are unheard so they are forced to make their way to safety on their own.
As I like to go into films fresh knowing almost nothing about them, I thought this might be a war film but was soon proven wrong. My wife took note of the two men’s conflict over Tanya and thought that it might be a love story. In the end, it’s a survival against nature story and perhaps one of the earliest examples of the genre. As a spectacle, this is jaw-dropping not least because we know that this was made in the era before CGI so the clouds of smoke, the trees on fire, all of it must be real. Plus the fire is just the first of many trials these intrepid explorers must confront and all of it is just as convincing. The camerawork is excellent with a particularly frenetic shot of the characters running through the forest. The problem is that the earlier love triangle doesn’t have very much to do with the desperate struggle for survival later and indeed Sergei is the first to die. I guess that the intent is to provide some character development so that the audience will care more for these characters but it feels clumsy and irrelevant to me.
Indeed I find the contrast between the amazing visuals and simplicity of the characters’ motivations to be jarring. When Sergei professes to be in love with Tanya, I’m more inclined to believe that it is lust from the close contact and being cut off from everyone else. Yet neither the film nor anyone else calls him out for it and so it must be taken at face value despite Sergei being an older and presumably more experienced man. That the entire team really are there prospecting for diamonds for the good of the Soviet state is equally hard to take seriously. There is no doubt that this is at least in part a propaganda film. The framing the heroic shots of the characters and the stirring messages on the radio confirm this. This might be acceptable to me in moderation but this is way too much. At one point, seemingly on the brink of death, Konstantin rouses himself to declare “No!” to adversity because that is the duty of a Soviet man. It’s cringey and I just can’t take it seriously. It’s disappointing to me that such a technically perfect film is coupled with a blatant and shallow propaganda message.
A final quibble that I have with this film is that the passage of time feels abrupt and uneven. We are meant to infer from the context alone how much time has passed in between scenes. While it’s believable that they might have spent weeks or more excavating the hillside or panning rivers, it’s strange that they are supposed to have trekked for days across a burning forest. Anyway I admire the director’s technical achievements here but the overriding theme and message are so contrary to my own understanding of the world and what really moves people that I find it utterly unconvincing. I simply cannot find it in me to care for this film.