TODAY’S BEST BET: Remember *Whose* Alamo? Брестская крепость/Brest Fortress (Drama. Russia, 2010)(Dom Kino, 14:00) -- > Aleksandr Kott’s “Brest Fortress” is long on stout-heartedness but short on rationale – which stems, in part, from the existence of several versions of the Brest siege story that need telling… One Brest narrative goes like this: a small, improvised group of garrison defenders heroically holds off multiple German assaults by a vastly superior force of infantry, artillery and an entire Luftwaffe-supported Panzer corps before eventually leaving the fortress to fight on elsewhere – except for the remnants of 1 infantry regiment who decide to stay and fight to the end. This is the stuff of a great movie, all right – but not a great *Russian* movie, as this summary describes not the Soviet defense of the fortress in 1941, but the Polish defense in 1939. This episode of Polish Alamo-like heroism against the “German-fascist aggressors” – a term soon to become familiar to Russians – remains little known to Russian audiences today; it was necessitated, of course, by the co-operation of the Third Reich and the Soviet Union under the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement that provided for Poland’s division and ensured its military defeat. The victorious Germans handed over the city and its fortress only days after securing them to their newly-arrived Soviet partners. The two armies then staged an amicable victory parade through Brest and parted company…only to meet again in June 1941, at the point when Kott’s “Brest Fortress” begins the *Russian* Brest narrative: the fortress is again besieged and again defended heroically, this time by outmanned and outgunned Red Army units left to their fate by a Stalinist high command that had criminally mismanaged both the preparations for and early conduct of this second stage of World War II. So, would Kott’s Russian-Belarussian movie be more accurately titled “Brest Fortress II: The Soviet Defense”? That “translation” of the title from Russian into Polish might be the only way this well-mounted film attracts an audience (or gets released at all) in Warsaw. Which is unlikely in any case, however, as there’s not a word in it about the fort’s previous heroic defense – whose leader, General Plisowski, apparently met an untimely end in the massacre ordered by Stalin, as the Russian State Duma finally agreed in the run-up to D. Medvedev’s visit, at Katyn. Kott’s film determinedly avoids the politics of the era, which is both a good thing and a bad one: good in the sense that the heavy-handed ideological motifs that marked (and marred) so much Soviet-era filmmaking are almost entirely absent; there is little to distract viewers from the genuine drama of the Soviet defense of the fortress, which was indeed heroic, or from the development of certain characters among its defenders. Both of these are handled better by Kott than in the Soviet film treating the same events, the 1956 “Bessmertnyi Garnizon” (The Immortal Garrison), and in the initial post-Soviet version, “Ya Russky Soldat” (I Am a Russian Soldier, 1995). The down side to this approach, of course, is that once you subtract all political/historical context, heavy-handed and otherwise, from a battle drama, many viewers will be left with very little sense of what the conflict unfolding before them, however superbly staged, was actually about. When the entire set-up for a prolonged and terrifying battle sequence is a brief, idyllic collage of people happily spending the day that preceded it, the intensity, indeed fury, of the days and weeks that follow is hard to appreciate: the action takes place in a kind of horrifying vacuum, as though all this ghastly carnage and unbelievable bravery had, like a cyclone or tsunami, *just happened*. But Alamos don’t just happen. Ask people in Warsaw. And Texas. Kott’s movie is very, very good at what it does; but the question remains whether this natural-disaster approach is worth doing. Americans have been making movies about their Alamo almost as long as they’ve been making movies, and a certain progress in dealing with historical reality is indeed evident between the unabashedly chauvinistic D. W. Griffith epic of 1915 (“Martyrs of the Alamo”) and the most recent big-budget version, Touchstone’s 2004 “The Alamo”, in which a “revisionist” and very human Crockett tells a dying comrade “I’m real sorry about all this.” We all want an Alamo we can believe in. And while our moviemakers will probably never create one that suits everybody, they shouldn’t stop trying; and we shouldn’t stop going. As for the Kott entry, do a bit of pre-reading – in Western, Polish and Russian sources, if you can – and then tune it in this afternoon (or watch on YouTube below). The virtues of “Brest Fortress” clearly make it worth the effort. youtube/watch?v=l7LjEdFbnTQ
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 08:11:45 +0000
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