In the Flesh: War and Peace (1966-67)

The first blush of combat in Sergei Bondarchuk’s monumental adaptation of Tolstoy’s masterpiece is a staggering sensory experience. Thousands of uniformed soldiers maneuver onscreen, forming lines and squares, jockeying for position in the hills of Lower Austria. Smoke drifts in waves from ranks of muskets and the belching mouths of cannon. Horses thunder past at dizzying speed, and Bondarchuk manages with ingenious skill to capture the feeling of hurtling through the midst of this orderly yet unspeakably chaotic enterprise of mass death, of bouncing in the saddle at forty miles an hour, an infinitesimal piece of a gigantic killing machine. And then, more remarkably still, he brings us into the emotional shock of one of his many players so intimately that it shocks us in turn, not with sudden gore or terrifying loss, but with childish fear and lack of comprehension.

As Nikolai Rostóv, actor Oleg Tabakov has a kind of easy, generous charm, his boyish good looks and family name speeding him past the consequences of his own foolishness in the arenas of love and gambling more than once. He dreams of proving himself on the battlefield through acts of manly valor, of returning to society as a celebrated hussar whose bravery is beyond doubt, but in his first charge against the French he not only loses heart but suffers an aporia, a sudden depressive loss of understanding of a fixture of his worldview, regarding war. Takabov’s expression as the unhorsed Rostóv wonders in voiceover if the French can truly be coming to kill him is heartbreakingly genuine, a child’s terrified incomprehension as his beloved father turns on him in anger. 

The whole cinematic edifice of war which Bondarchuk has built so expertly and with such speed around his actors seems all at once to be in the process of collapse not just on a physical level as the chaos of combat takes hold, but on a philosophical level as well. Rostóv’s flight by foot from the French advance, his wounding and eventual miraculous escape, are as beautifully captured as his horseback charge, but rather than kinetic headlong momentum Bondarchuk chooses to elicit a sensation of confusion, frequently tilting his shots up at the vast bowl of the sky where ragged clouds scud across bottomless pale blue, like the eye of God staring down without affection at this man who cannot comprehend, having ridden off to war with dreams of glory, that anyone could wish to kill such a fine and beloved boy. His devastating revelation is not that he is mortal, but that his enemies are human.

Who are these men?” thought Rostóv, scarcely believing his eyes. “Can they be French?” He looked at the approaching Frenchmen, and though but a moment before he had been galloping to get at them and hack them to pieces, their proximity now seemed so awful that he could not believe his eyes. “Who are they? Why are they running? Can they be coming at me? And why? To kill me? Me whom everyone is so fond of?” He remembered his mother’s love for him, and his family’s, and his friends’, and the enemy’s intention to kill him seemed impossible.