Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on laptop.
There’s something about Soviet films that I find depressing. In part, that’s sort of what Soviet films are, even when they’re trying to be inspiring. There is a deep sense of fatalism, of great suffering as the only guarantee. When I say that such films often leave me cold, I don’t mean that in a figurative sense, but a literal one—to enhance the guaranteed suffering, these films are frequently set in winter with tons and tons of snow. With Voskhozhdenie (The Ascent), we get all the suffering at once, and within the first five minutes. A group of Russians, some soldiers and some civilians, are on the run from invading German troops some time during World War II. They’re freezing and virtually out of food.
Desperate for food, two of the men are sent off to find something to bring back to the partisans. These men are Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) and Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin). Of the two, Sotnikov appears the more fatalistic, almost working under the assumption that he is going to die; this is no doubt influenced by his being wracked with fever. Rybak is fatalistic, too, but also seems to maintain some level of cheerfulness despite himself. The two find a far destroyed by the Germans, then make it to a small village where they take a sheep from the head man (Sergei Yakovlev), partly because they need the meat and partly because his position as village elder means that he is collaborating with the Germans, at least on the surface.
