OVERVIEW
During the darkest winter of the Great Patriotic War, two Soviet partisans set out across Nazi-occupied Belarus in search of provisions for their starving outfit. Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) is resourceful and more experienced, while Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov) is frail and untested. The two are spotted, pursued, and seized by the Germans and held for interrogation alongside a handful of villagers, where survival is offered at the price of betrayal.
BACKGROUND
By 1974, Larisa Shepitko was in her thirties and had already built a reputation as one of the most admired and most stubborn directors working in the Soviet system. She discovered Sotnikov, a 1970 novella by veteran war author Vasil Bykaŭ, while she was in a hospital bed, convinced her end was near after a fall during her pregnancy. One of Bykaŭ’s most renowned war novellas of the period, the book gave shape to her fear, and making the film became something she ‘had’ to do. The shoot was arduous, a cast of unknowns directed in the freezing forests, but releasing it was almost as difficult. Because of the book’s politically dangerous subject, the film was nearly shelved more than once, and a clandestine screening for the Belarusian party chief, himself a former partisan, was what ultimately saved it. It won Berlin’s Golden Bear in 1977 and became one of the most pivotal films produced by the Soviet Union. Shepitko died two years after its release, while scouting her next film, and The Ascent became her final work.
THE REVIEW
Everything Shepitko endured to make the film is visible on screen. The opening moments put you inside an unforgiving winter, and from there, white snow floods most of the black-and-white frame until it becomes the dominant fact of the image. Shot on location on Soviet stock, grainier and lower in resolution than the Kodak Western films used that same year, The Ascent carries a haze that softens fine detail, and Shepitko turns that limitation into the look itself. Snow blurs into the sky and often into the men, until figures and landscape read as one undifferentiated white that presses on them from every side. When night falls, the darkness becomes almost comforting, even inside the cellar where the captives are held. Living has never felt so miserable.
Shepitko subjected the actors to brutal conditions, making them stay for hours in the cold (which she would also endure herself), so the exhaustion and despair seen on their faces are genuine rather than acted. She also uses Alfred Schnittke’s score with remarkable restraint, holding back its sparse, dissonant force until the explosive finale. Also of note is the production design that hollows out every village the soldiers pass through, reducing them to desolate shells of what they were.
That unbearable ground is what lets Shepitko study her two men. She and her screenwriter, Yuri Klepikov, strip much of the action out of the book to focus on how each one faces what is coming. At the start of their journey, Rybak talks about the girl he once loved and how he will find her when the war ends, while Sotnikov struggles to keep pace, slowed by his health. As they reach the first farm and find it burned to the ground, Rybak wants to press on, unwilling to be seen coming back without finishing the job. Sotnikov goes with him out of pure duty, though he knows he is slowing Rybak down. The script grants empathy to both men, and their friction only grows until it breaks open in the cellar, where Rybak pleads that he wants to live, and Sotnikov answers that some things are worse than dying. “Don’t crawl in shit,” he tells him. “You’ll never wash it off.”
For all the attention on the two soldiers, the deeper tragedy belongs to the villagers caught with them, imprisoned for the act of helping people in need. Their choices are crueler, because they are not weighing their own skin but the lives of those who depend on them: the children left alone at home, the mentally ill woman the elder leaves behind. Portnov (Anatoly Solonitsyn) is another fascinating character. Once a children’s choirmaster, he now runs the collaborationist auxiliary police and does the Germans’ interrogating for them. Solonitsyn plays him as a man who has had his humanity worn out of him over the years, yet a faint regret still crosses his face as he watches the final execution.
The narrative is a slow burn. The first half immerses you in the bleak winter, even as the two men meander from place to place. It intensifies once they are caught and grows more harrowing as the prisoners’ fate keeps getting hinted at, and even though you can feel what is coming, the moment it arrives still lands like a blow. Shepitko never lets the tragedy tip into melodrama, even when the material all but invites it. There are a few moments that take you out of the film, owing to Shepitko not working with trained actors, an unconvincing cry from a girl among them, or the way Sotnikov’s cough conveniently disappears during his interrogation. Those are small things against the whole. The film is an immense directorial achievement, and its final twenty minutes run one devastating scene into the next, among the most punishing sequences of war cinema I have sat through.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Like the best war films, The Ascent is a war film with almost no war in it, in the usual sense. The only real battle is over before the opening credits finish, and from there, Shepitko keeps her camera on faces. It belongs to the small company of war films you could call anti-war, but in the end, the fighting is only a backdrop to what she wants to explore, her own search for a formula of immortality. In his last moments, Sotnikov’s gaze settles on a small boy in the crowd, shaken by what he sees. Sotnikov’s name may long be forgotten, but his conviction will not. A sickening scene turns graceful, the dying finding peace and their “ascent,” while the cruelty lingers for those who chose to live at any cost, granted a freedom they will never be able to use.