Sergei Bondarchuk’s Fate
of a Man ends with a citation from Mikhail Sholokhov, the author of the source
material: “I’d like to believe that this Russian, this man of unbreakable will,
will stick it out, and that the boy will grow at his father’s side into a man
who can endure anything, overcome any obstacle, should his country ever call
upon him to do so.” The words may sound stirring, but when attached to a work
that so amply demonstrates the horror of war, it forms a rather depressing final
note: that is, when applied to a protagonist, Sokolov, who lost his wife and
three children, the boy in question being an orphan to whom Sokolov becomes a
symbolic father after coming across him alone and scrounging for food, one might
feel the measure of future success ought to be greater than the opportunity to
be fodder in a further cataclysm (a thought that takes on extra resonance when
considered in the context of Ukraine-related losses). But then, even after all
he suffers (facing an apparently imminent death at least three times, and more
broadly living through unimaginable deprivation and battering), Sokolov
(memorably embodied by Bondarchuk himself) still takes an almost childish pride
in knowing that his son rose from humble beginnings to reach the rank of
captain before being killed, and while the film contains several performatively
cruel or useless Nazis, the Russian side is spared such dissection, the film implicitly
approving of Sokolov’s murder of a countryman who fails to show adequate
solidarity (it also demonstrates, in one of its most intimately tense sequences,
how the Russian capacity for alcohol might be a life-saver). Still, it’s
stunningly visualized throughout, providing any number of eye-filling vistas, and
the human chronicle at its core is often mesmerizing, no matter one’s awareness
of its stacked ideological underpinnings.
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