Devastating. Larissa Shepitko's final film (that she died gives me a sadness all by itself) is about how war, in its systematic barbarism, reveals men to be at their lowest... and, at times, if it happens, their bravest. And there's not a whole heck of a lot that can be done when in the face of unadulterated and immovable evil like with Nazis in the coldest depths of hell. And there's not much that compares sure the hell of being sentenced to death while cheery German music plays. The Ascent is bleak and awfully grim, but if it's punctuated by anything it's the pocket of humanity that comes from the Sotnikov character and his sacrifices... or what he tries to do in the name of a conscience.
And while I know Come and See is held up, perhaps rightfully so, as the grimest story of war being hell upon the citizens of Earth in the middle 20th century, The Ascent carries even more tragic power for me (maybe a little greater, if not with the same punch of those set pieces) because one gets interested in the first half with these two Russian soldiers, how they stumble through the winter wilderness and then wind up at the farm that will lead to their doom. And it's about how humans beings in desperate times will find their moral compass challenged and will meet it or fail it.
Boris Plotnikov as Sotnikov - who has that kind of intense fire in his eyes as a performer that is Method level in feeling like he took everything in him to do this - especially in that look that he gives to the boy from across the way in the last part of the film in that climactic beat - in many shots and moments strikes me as a Russian Richard Widmark.... if Widmark had turned in a Jesus-level performance. But equally impactful is the "Judas" of the film, the doomed turn from Gostyuhkhin as the soldier who sells his soul. Those final minutes of him in that camp tear you up inside, in some part because, perhaps, that could just as easily be you or me.
What a couple set of characters, what unrelenting direction, and what a perfect example of equally loose and controlled black and white cinematography by Lebeshev, staggering hand-held compositions and longer, inexorably drawn slow zoom ins and imprisoning close ups, for the clarity of vision given to such a harrowing and tragic, hopeless and cold story (I wonder if Kaminski and Spielberg watched this before Schindler's List).
And while I know Come and See is held up, perhaps rightfully so, as the grimest story of war being hell upon the citizens of Earth in the middle 20th century, The Ascent carries even more tragic power for me (maybe a little greater, if not with the same punch of those set pieces) because one gets interested in the first half with these two Russian soldiers, how they stumble through the winter wilderness and then wind up at the farm that will lead to their doom. And it's about how humans beings in desperate times will find their moral compass challenged and will meet it or fail it.
Boris Plotnikov as Sotnikov - who has that kind of intense fire in his eyes as a performer that is Method level in feeling like he took everything in him to do this - especially in that look that he gives to the boy from across the way in the last part of the film in that climactic beat - in many shots and moments strikes me as a Russian Richard Widmark.... if Widmark had turned in a Jesus-level performance. But equally impactful is the "Judas" of the film, the doomed turn from Gostyuhkhin as the soldier who sells his soul. Those final minutes of him in that camp tear you up inside, in some part because, perhaps, that could just as easily be you or me.
What a couple set of characters, what unrelenting direction, and what a perfect example of equally loose and controlled black and white cinematography by Lebeshev, staggering hand-held compositions and longer, inexorably drawn slow zoom ins and imprisoning close ups, for the clarity of vision given to such a harrowing and tragic, hopeless and cold story (I wonder if Kaminski and Spielberg watched this before Schindler's List).