Review: Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying on Criterion Blu-ray

Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying starts like a silent production, with two lovers frolicking down a riverside street as Mieczysław Weinberg’s buoyant score displaces any diegetic sound. Even when the couple begins to speak, they’re captured in a manner that communicates as much through aesthetics as it does through speech (shades of both Soviet constructivism and old Hollywood melodramas). The camera shoots Veronika (Tatiana Samoilova) and Boris (Alexei Batalov) at low angles, and in such a way that their carefree stroll, complete with their getting playfully soaked by a street cleaner, attains an iconic quality.

Early on, The Cranes Are Flying derives tension from the contrast between such cheerful moments and depictions of the horrors faced in the Soviet Union following the Nazi invasion during World War II. Boris regularly works long hours at a Moscow factory, and the film’s interiors are enveloped in darkness from the windows that have been blacked out as protection against the Luftwaffe’s dive-bombing. Boris, like other young men, eventually volunteers for military service, and for all of his and his family’s patriotic fervor, a heavy, foreboding silence offsets the talk between old men about the eventual monuments that will be built for the noble fallen. Later, a scene intercuts the teeming bustle of the people of Boris’s small village (in present-day Belarus) seeing off their young men with the assembled recruits quickly honing their discipline on the eve of war.

The film abounds in such contrasts. One notable scene juxtaposes the optimism of the young men going off to training with civilians silently huddled in a subway during an air raid, their faces conveying the misery that’s crept into wartime life. And this horror is intensified by the claustrophobic manner in which Kalatozov uses close-ups and whip pans to reveal the devastation that’s engulfed Boris’s town, as in a remarkable sequence where Veronika runs through the streets back to her ruined apartment, sprinting up burning stairs to find nothing but open air where her flat used to be. But the war isn’t the only evil that she must contend with. In a wildly stylized scene, Boris’s cousin, Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin), who connived his way to a deferment, sexually assaults Veronika in the midst of a thunderstorm rendered in expressionistic flashes of white that blindingly take over the screen. Kalatozov cuts around any explicit image of what occurs, but the manner in which the storm seems to erupt out of Mark’s barely suppressed desire for Veronika makes the implications of his actions all too clear.

The remainder of the film unfolds as a grand-scale domestic melodrama, one in which Veronika is strong-armed into a marriage with Mark, and to the disgust of friends and family, who ostracize the young woman as she simultaneously deals with the pressures of serving as a nurse in a ward overflowing with wounded soldiers, always scanning their faces for sight of Boris. Wide-angle shots amplify the poor Veronika’s increasingly addled mental state, turning hospital rooms and domestic clutter into expressionistically distorted prisons. Elsewhere, close-ups transform faces into widened, surreal shapes that look as if they might jump right out of the screen, while the camera’s general placement above or below characters makes for vertiginously angled backdrops that loom or sink behind people in the frame.

Sergey Urusevsky’s camera also imbues the same locations with vastly different tones depending on the context of a scene. The stairs leading down from the bridge where we see Veronika and Boris in the opening scene are shot brightly with the camera capturing much of the open sky; when Mark accosts Veronika on the same steps, the shot mostly frames the stone wall of the steps with only a sliver of sky visible above, foreshadowing Veronika’s loss of hope. Also notable, a later scene of a despondent Veronika running to a train station to attempt suicide is sped up so that she seems to be sprinting faster than a locomotive itself, and an earlier depiction of a soldier’s death features rapid zooming in and out of a shot of the moon that prevents the image from focusing as the life leaves the character’s eyes.

Which is to say that every facet of the film’s highly subjective camerawork is a reflection of the narrative’s funhouse-mirror distortions of Soviet realism. Indeed, The Cranes of Flying makes space for the heroism and noble suffering seen in the dogmatic Russian cinema of the time, but it does so while simultaneously approaching Veronika’s travails with nuance and more than a little contempt for the system that barely reclaims her at the end.

Image/Sound

The overwhelming beauty of the film’s medium- and at times high-contrast cinematography is captured in sharp detail by Criterion’s transfer, every shade of gray easily discernible to the eye. The sparkle of sunlight on water and the lines of shadow that cobweb the ceilings of blacked-out apartments are crisply rendered, while textures are stable throughout. The soundtrack is similarly exceptional, conveying the full-on bombast of the ironically patriotic score while leaving plenty of room in the center channel for the nuances of the tense characters’ quiet dialogue exchanges. There are no issues here with hiss or audio bleed.

Extras

In a new interview, film scholar Ian Christie unpacks why The Cranes Are Flying is such a landmark of Soviet cinema, breaking away as it did from decades of forcibly pro-state propaganda with its focus on individual tragedy and its ambivalence about the heroism of war. A segment from a 2008 program about the film’s cinematography uses interviews with those who worked with Sergey Urusevsky, even some of his old storyboards, to delve into his artistic approach, while a documentary filmed around the same time tackles Mikhail Kalatozov’s radical career and conflicts with the Soviet government. In a 2001 interview, filmmaker Claude Lelouch discusses his role in getting The Cranes Are Flying submitted to Cannes, where it became the first and still only Russian film to win the Palme d’Or, and a 1961 audio interview with Kalatozov finds him explaining his outlook on art, memorably saying at one point: “It seems to me that one of the great expressive tools of poetic cinema is a free and liberated camera.” An accompanying booklet contains an essay by critic Chris Fujiwara that analyzes the film’s surprising and unpredictable narrative and tonal shifts.

Overall

One of the greatest films of the Soviet era receives a superlative 2K restoration that fully enshrines the spellbinding visual talents of its director and cinematographer.