Yesterday I spent eight and a half hours swept up in the great current that is Sergei Bondarchuk’s adaptation of War and Peace—now playing in a dazzling new restoration at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. A patriotic Soviet response to King Vidor’s 1956 version—which starred Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn and had been a hit in the USSR—Bondarchuk’s film is a sweeping epic, stunning in its ambition and scope. Leo Tolstoy’s novel unfolds on a vast canvas. Bondarchuk, who also co-wrote the screenplay and starred as Pierre Bezhukov, paints the story in both broad brushstrokes and pointillistic detail: a cavalry charge carries as much weight as the touch of a hand on a man’s shoulder.
War and Peace was the most expensive film ever made in the Soviet Union. The shoot lasted five and a half years. The sets were furnished with artefacts from over 40 museums; thousands of costumes were sewn. And Bondarchuk suffered a heart attack. (For more on the making of the film, an epic drama in and of itself, I recommend Bilge Ebiri’s excellent article in Vulture.) The film went on to win the Grand Prix at the Moscow International Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Bondarchuk’s film is 421 minutes long and playing in four parts, just as it was originally released in the USSR: Part 1: Andrei Bolkonsky; Part 2: Natasha Rostova; Part 3: The Year 1812; and Part 4: Pierre Bezhukov. I saw all four in one sitting, an experience unlike any I have ever had at the cinema.
There are a multitude of reasons to see War and Peace. Here are just five:
The opening
Unidentifiable echoes, distorted as if heard under water. Green tendrils sprout under a microscope—young plants beginning to grow. Then, bird’s-eye views of rolling pastures and farmland, accompanied by the discordant clamour of canons and the cries of battle. The sounds vanish abruptly, replaced with the voice of the narrator (likely Bondarchuk himself) whispering, “Thoughts that have important consequences are always simple.” Next the camera ascends into the clouds and hangs suspended as a celestial choir sings and the opening credits appear. This is the opening to Andrei Bolkonsky and the entire film—a reverie from another plane.
Shifting perspectives
Bondarchuk’s film is largely the story of three people: the dashing, pensive Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov); his sensitive, indecisive friend Pierre (Bondarchuk); and Natasha Rostova (Ludmila Savelyeva), the naïve young woman who proves pivotal to both their lives. Yet the story constantly switches points of view and the camera follows suit. Cinematographers Anatoly Petritsky, Yu-Lan Chen and Alexander Shelenkov place the audience atop a charging cavalry horse’s back, show us a hunt through the hunted wolf’s eyes, enter the mind of a wounded soldier as he waits for death on the battlefield and drop us into a crowd of courtiers, jostling to catch sight of the Tsar. At Natasha’s first ball, the camera dances with her and Andrei (the cameraman wore roller skates) and weaves through guests on the sidelines, women’s fans flicking before the lens. Then Bondarchuk switches to an overhead panning shot of the ballroom, which sweeps forward, then skips back, over and over, so that the room stretches into infinity.
The performances
A grand spectacle is hollow without a good cast; Bondarchuk assembled a great one. His Pierre is an endearing, if often frustrating, idealist whose susceptibility to persuasion keeps leading him into trouble. Ludmila Savelyeva accomplishes the difficult task of showing Natasha grow from a flibbertigibbet into a mature woman who has known pain and loss. Best of all is Vyacheslav Tikhonov, whose dignified, conflicted Andrei is a still point in the chaos around him, no matter his inner turmoil.
The changing landscape
Bondarchuk reveals great swathes of the Russian countryside, tracking the changing seasons and the ravages of war. Despondent after a personal tragedy, Andrei views spring with contempt and feels kinship with a lone oak which remains bare. A little later, his hope restored, Andrei passes the same tree and is delighted to see it green with new life. At Christmas, the Rostovs race sleighs through the snow. Smoke from canon fire turns the sun over a battlefield bright orange long before it sets. The Grande Armée’s retreat from Moscow appears in all its slow-motion horror, autumn hardening into winter as the soldiers fight over paltry fires and dogs tear at corpses.
The scale
War and Peace is a monument to the imagination and daring of Soviet cinema. Bondarchuk recreates the Battle of Borodino—a Slough of Despond into which both the Russians and the French sink—with 12,000 extras, many of them soldiers in the Red Army. When Napoleon razes Moscow, the actors struggle through a maze of real burning buildings. An aerial shot, filmed using a helicopter, shows the whirling chaos of the Battle of Austerlitz—smoke billowing, the ground aflame, soldiers and horses running in circles. It is an image once seen, never forgotten.
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