The Ascent

Some months back TCM ran The Ascent in the TCM Import slot. The movie is available from Criterion's Eclipse series (although seemingly only at the Criterion site), so I sat down to watch it and do a full-length post here.

The scene is the occupied western part of the Soviet Union (what would now be Belarus) in the winter of 1942. What Russian soldiers might have been on the front are now partisans behind enemy lines, an extremely difficult existence. They're running out of food, but the commander knows of a farm nearby that may have some food they can commandeer. So he picks two men: Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukh) to go to the farm and get some food for the partisans.

It would be a difficult, dangerous mission in good weather, what with the Nazis all around. But it's the dead of winter so things are even worse. They get to a small house that is home to an elderly village elder and his wife, although when they get there they realize that the elder is a Nazi collaborator. The elder, for his part, claims that he was forced into it with the threat of losing his life, but still, collaborating with the Nazis is seen as treason in the Soviets' eyes, so the elder is taken out back and....

Eventually, the farm that the two soldiers were supposed to find is located, but it's been burned to the ground so there's no possibility of getting the needed food there. There's no point in going back to their commander without food, and they're probably lost anyway, so they head on. This despite the fact that Sotnikov gets shot in the leg which seriously slows him down and threatens to kill him. They end up at the house of a widow with young children who has clearly been aged before her time as a result of the war. She's not unwilling to help, although one wonders how much she can do. And then the Nazis come.

The soldiers hide in the attic, but are unsurprisingly found out by the Nazis and brought into town along with the woman; the children are left behind presumably to die. Soviet movies always had to show the Nazis' savagery, after all. In town, the two partisans are given the opportunity to turn sides and reveal what they know to the Nazis, in exchange for their lives. Now, you'd think that a Soviet movie would have the propaganda of making Red Army soldiers heroes who would never give in to the Nazis. But that's not what happens here. Sotnikov is probably going to die soon anyway, what with that wound and his general physical condition. So for him to resist the Nazis in his own little way isn't so difficult. But Rybak doesn't want to die, and faces a conscience of crisis.

The Ascent is a stark, emotionally draining picture, although I found a few slight quibbles with it that a lot of the other reviews I read didn't seem to have. The issue for me was that once the partisans get captured by the Nazis, the movie slows down to a crawl, which may make it even more difficult for some viewers. Still, the performances are quite good, and the cinematography, which was surprisingly in black and white for a movie from 1977, is starkly beautiful. War is hell, and The Ascent definitely shows it.

Sadly, director Larisa Shepitko was to die two years after making The Ascent in a car crash. She only left a couple of movies, but they deserve to be better known.