[por Rubén Uría]

Última jornada de la fase de clasificación para el Mundial de Alemania '74. El escenario escogido para una de las páginas más históricas del fútbol es Inglaterra, Londres, concretamente en el mítico estadio de Wembley, donde cien mil británicos abarrotan las gradas en mitad de una noche de perros, un 23 de octubre de 1973. Juegan Inglaterra y Polonia, en un encuentro donde los ingleses están obligados a ganar si quieren estar en la Copa del Mundo, mientras que a los polacos les basta con cosechar un empate. En su penúltimo encuentro, Inglaterra ha barrido a Austria (7-0) y la casa de apuestas William Hill no contempla una derrota local, por lo que sólo acepta apuestas acerca de qué número de goles van a encajar los polacos en Wembley. En la previa del choque, el controvertido y genial entrenador Brian Clough no duda en mofarse de los futbolistas del país del Este. Quizá fruto de sus devaneos con la bebida, Clough infravalora a su rival, se muestra cruel y se ceba con los polacos. Tacha a Lato de corredor de maratón calvo, de Gorgon dice que parece más un boxeador malo que un futbolista bueno y que Tomaszewski, el portero, es un payaso de circo. Polonia toma los dardos envenenados de Clough como una afrenta, aunque ninguno de sus futbolistas entra al trapo de sus declaraciones. Intuyen que en Wembley, ante Inglaterra, es sencillo encajar una goleada. A la hora del encuentro, ingleses y polacos entrecruzan miradas por la bocana de vestuarios. Los pross clavan sus miradas en los futbolistas de Polonia y les hacen gestos universales con los dedos de la mano. El inglés más recatado les muestra tres dedos que vaticinan un cómodo resultado final de 3-0. La mayoría, más confiada y optimista, les enseña toda la palma de la mano, augurando un 5-0 final. Al cabo de los minutos, ambos equipos pisan el césped sacro-santo de Wembley. Suena el himno nacional de Polska y desde la grada se escucha el rugir de la grada con un grito despectivo:"Animales, animales". A continuación, resuenan las notas del "God Save The Queen" en mitad de un estruendo brutal de un público enfervorizado, que contrasta con la tiritona generalizada de la formación polaca. Inglaterra forma con Peter Shilton bajo palos; Madeley, McFarland, Hunter y Hugues en cobertura; Colin Bell, Currie, y Channon en el centro del campo; y Chivers, Peters y Clarke en ataque. Polonia presenta un dibujo con Domarski, Gadocha y Lato como puntas; Czimikiewicz, Kasperkczack y Deyna en mitad de cancha; Szymanowski, Bulzacki, Musial y Gorgon como zagueros y, como último hombre, el portero Jan Tomaszewski. Justo antes del pitido final, las cámaras de la BBC enfocan al tipo que está a punto de encajar una severa goleada, el ínclito Tomaszewski, el meta del que Brian Clough había dicho que era un payaso. El polaco miraba al cielo y elevaba una plegaria al altísimo. "Si estás ahí arriba, no dejes que hagamos el ridículo y nos hagan siete goles como a Austria. Si estás ahí en los cielos, echa una mano a once pobres chicos polacos".

Tomaszewski, tras la súplica divina y antes de que la previsible masacre diera comienzo, embutía sus manos en unos guantes. Unas manoplas de pintor que su suegro le había regalado, porque en Polonia no había presupuesto para comprar unos guantes de portero. Inglaterra arrancó pisando el acelerador, comenzó apabullando en el centro del campo y descargó continuos ataques por banda buscando el punto de penalti. El acoso y derribo se volvió aún peor cuando Colin Bell empezó a tomar el mando de las operaciones. Ningún polaco podía frenarle, y parecía que Bell tenía alas en los pies. A los diez minutos, Inglaterra falló un mano a mano con Tomaszewski. A los quince, Peters cabeceó fuera. Acto seguido, Bell disparaba un misil y la pelota se marchaba junto al poste polaco. El gol parecía una simple cuestión de tiempo pero, a medida que las manecillas del reloj iban avanzando, el público de Wembley comenzaba a desesperarse. Todos los balones acababan en las manos de Tomaszewski, el portero polaco. Con un inesperado empate sin goles, ambos bandos se marcharon a los vestuarios. Inglaterra estaba fuera del Mundial y los polacos sabían que la segunda parte se convertiría en un auténtico infierno para ellos.

Sin embargo, a los diez minutos del segundo acto, Gregorz Lato - el calvo del maratón según definición de Clough- comenzó una feroz galopada por la izquierda hasta la línea de fondo, conectó con Gadocha, que cruzó una pelota que llevaba veneno y... ahí, en tierra de nadie, saliéndose del guión prestablecido, aparecía Domarski para rematar sin demasiada colocación. La pelota, que no se levantó un palmo del suelo, pasó por debajo de los brazos de Peter Shilton. Polonia había conseguido lo que parecía imposible y se adelantaba en el marcador (0-1). La BBC de Londres situaba a su audiencia con el siguiente relato de los hechos: "Es imposible de creer...Dios mio, qué tragedia, Polonia ha marcado en Wembley. Es imposible pero es cierto, Inglaterra tiene que atacar sin parar a partir de ahora..." 

...Y los ingleses atacaron. Atacaron, atacaron y atacaron. Fueron, según testimonios posteriores del cerebro polaco Kazimierz Deyna, "los siete minutos peores de toda mi vida, no salíamos del área y ellos volaban como aviones". Con Inglaterra desatada sobre el área de Tomaszewski, el árbitro concedió penalti a favor de los ingleses en el minuto 63. El inglés Alan Clarke, un fuera de serie, colocó la pelota. Se colocó con los brazos en jarra, cogió carrerilla y golpeó con potencia. El que según Clough sólo era un payaso bajo los palos, el portero de Polonia, no pudo atrapar la pelota. Inglaterra había empatado y aún quedaba media hora por delante para que la casa de apuestas de William Hill hiciera su agosto. Desde ahí hasta el final del choque, los ingleses metieron la directa. Peters remató un par de veces fuera, luego lo hizo Clarke y más tarde, otra vez Peters. Después, los aficionados que esa noche se dieron cita en Wembley sólo recordarían un nombre y un apellido: el de Jan Tomaszewski. Con Inglaterra en plan Séptimo de Caballería, el bueno de Jan desvió en primera instancia un chutazo de Peters y sacó una volea posterior de Clarke. Luego le tocó a McFarland, que volvió a obtener el mismo resultado, paradón del polaco. A continuación fue Bell el que chocó con el muro de Polonia, que le sacó una mano prodigiosa. Minutos más tarde, en mitad de una avalancha británica y con Tomaszewski ya batido, un defensa sacaba la pelota de la misma línea de gol. Inglaterra seguía con el cuchillo entre los dientes, pero sólo quedaban diez minutos para el final. Tiempo suficiente para marcar un gol en cualquier otra circunstancia y ante cualquier rival del mundo, pero no esa noche. No para marcarle un gol a Tomaszewski. En el último suspiro del encuentro, Inglaterra bota un saque de esquina. El balón surca el cielo de Wembley, ningún polaco acierta a meter la cabeza y el cuero queda muerto en el área pequeña. Alan Clarke, el mejor de su equipo, arma la pierna para el disparo. Está en el borde del área pequeña, ve que tiene toda la portería para él y la pega con el alma. Wembley grita gol, pero una figura borrosa, que se mueve a gran velocidad, intercepta la pelota y el balón sale rebotado como si hubiera golpeado contra una pared. Se trata de Tomaszewski, el polaco que había pedido ayuda divina. Segundos después, para desesperación de Wembley y frustración inglesa, el árbitro pita el final del encuentro. Inglaterra estaba fuera del Mundial y Polonia, treinta y tantos años después, volvía a disputar la fase final de una Copa del Mundo. Al día siguiente, los periódicos ingleses publicaron en portada una foto de Tomaszewski en una de sus estiradas, bajo el título "The man who stopped England" (El hombre que paró a Inglaterra). 

Nadie podía imaginarlo, pero aquella milagrosa actuación de Jan Tomaszewski en Wembley, en octubre de 1973, fue el germen de la mejor selección polaca de fútbol de todos los tiempos. Los que presuntamente iban a ser goleados sin piedad por los ingleses acudieron a la Copa del Mundo de Alemania un año después y fueron terceros. En ese Mundial, el meta polaco fue elegido mejor cancerbero del torneo, y fue el primer guardameta de la historia capaz de detener dos penas máximas en un mismo campeonato. Cuatro años más tarde, en el Mundial de Argentina de 1978, Polonia repetiría su tercer puesto. Después de aquellas heróicas actuaciones, Tomaszewski fue reconocido, años después, como mejor portero de la historia de Polonia. El bueno de Jan vistió la elástica polaca en 63 ocasiones, jugó en el Legia de Varsovia, en el Beerschot de Bélgica y se retiró en España, en el Hércules de Alicante. A día de hoy, Jan Tomaszewski sigue vinculado al mundo del fútbol como comentarista deportivo, faceta a través de la cual pudo participar en varios viajes con selecciones inferiores. En aquellos viajes, sobre todo cuando pisaba suelo inglés, era frecuente que los policías, al pedirle el pasaporte en los aeropuertos, le reconocían como El hombre que paró a Inglaterra "The Man Who Stopped England". Cuentan que, en uno de esos viajes, el mejor portero polaco de todos los tiempos se reencontró con el mítico entrenador inglés Brian Clough. Cuando Clough le reconoció, se acercó a Tomaszewski y le pidió disculpas por haberle llamado payaso en su día. 

Aquella noche del 23 de octubre de 1973, la historia futbolística de Inglaterra y Polonia cambió para siempre. Los ingleses pensaban que aquel muchacho polaco que vestía de amarillo y llevaba guantes extraños sería un payaso que les haría reír. Tomaszewski, de amarillo huevón, fue todo lo contrario. Fue un payaso que les hizo llorar. Y fue así porque quizá aquella noche inolvidable, mientras Jan embutía sus manos en los guantes de pintor de su suegro, Dios escuchó su plegaria. Quizá El Señor echó un vistazo al caldero hirviendo de Wembley y conmovido por las súplicas de Tomaszewski, echó una mano a "aquellos pobres chicos polacos". 

It wasn't that bad a thing it was never shown on TV again. The film was just dull.
The message was quite simple and you do clock on a bit later on that it's a message about the time in Northern Ireland where murders were happening left right and centre but that is only shown in blink and you miss it moments.
It happens with a gentleman (different one each scene) walking to a place, camera follows him with some lingering shots, he then finds a guy and shoots him with a gun.
There's very little variety though and for a film that is trying to deglamorize violence it doesn't do a good job. If you don't have the budget to make someone being shot in the head look realistic then steer clear of shooting them in the head.

Maybe it's because I'm not from Northern Ireland and don't remember the time all these things were happening that well. The point is that it is dull and even though it does make you realise that violence is happening around us and we don't know who or why it could of been half the length and still had the same reaction.
It's a good film which hasn't stood the test of time and is just far too long for what it is. All that being said there are some great shots in the film and a few moments which break the repetitive nature up a bit but nowhere near enough.

5/10.

I'm sure many of us know him best from things like Scum, the TV play (1977) about the brutality of the borstal system, which was banned by the Beeb, so got remade as a theatrical feature (1979 - launching Ray Winstone's career into the bargain); or Gary Oldman as an estate agent-cum-football hooligan in The Firm (Clarke's last film, in 1989); or Made In Britain (1983), with Tim Roth as an articulate, angry young skinhead.

But aside from these more celebrated works, 'Clarkie' also knocked out some pretty provocative - and sometimes very fucking weird - pieces which never really got the attention they deserved. Well, maybe I'm just a bit vanilla, because in some respects even Clarke's lesser known stuff has been influential on film makers, but more on that in a sec.

Amongst the stuff I've been watching for the first time, the most disappointing was 1981's Psy-Warriors. This has great promise - three people are kept in some kind of detention facility, where they are subjected to all manner of torture and interrogation; as the play unfolds we realise they are volunteers in a military psychological warfare experiment. But despite some excellent performances (from Derrick O' Connor as mouthy prisoner Richards, Anthony Bate as the calmly in control commander of the unit, and Colin Blakely as the principal army psychologist), and a brilliantly realised set, all too soon you can find yourself detached from what unfolds, as it develops from strongly conceived deception into stagey clichés. Too much of the dialogue tries to hard to be meaningful and is delivered with equal amounts of leaden earnestness (especially by Rosalind Ayres as the only woman, Turner). And perhaps crucially, the structure fragments too quickly, and we find ourselves privy to too much information from the perspective of the captors rather than remaining with the confused and disorientated captives. Not only that, but the initial wonder we have at the imposing, stark, whitewashed set dissolves into frustration when the action - well, the talking - moves to a banal, over-familiar lounge set, of the sort you encounter in 70s/80s two camera French windows drama.

Despite these criticisms though, Psy-Warriors (which was broadcast as part of the often excellent Play For Today strand) is still most watchable, and stimulating with it. No doubt at the time of its production - the dirty, blanket and hunger protests coming to a crescendo in Northern Ireland, where near-panopticon Maze prison was a focus for much concern, along with allegations of a systematic campaign of torture orchestrated by the British army on suspects - this was a contentious little film. It certainly has resonance in our post-Gitmo world, with its reference to "sticks up bums, bums on blocks of ice, licking the lav bowl, nudity, humiliation... Running round in circles, pissing in the wind", the clinical assessment of the most efficient forms of cruelty, the pragmatic expediency with which the immoral is duly reclassified as essential.

[audio http://bristlesblogtunes.podomatic.com/enclosure/2008-01-15T10_09_59-08_00.mp3]
Northey's speech about the British army's quest for ever-more effective interrogation techniques

So whilst its moments of clunking staginess (not enough rehearsal, perhaps? Too fast a turnaround once on set?) and the curate's egg script by David Leland (who by way of mitigation also gave us Mona Lisa, Personal Services and Wish You Were Here) let it down, overall it feels like a good attempt at the not exactly easy subject matter. Plus you get Warren Clarke (himself an Alan Clarke by birth) in a natty 'tache as an army officer, reclining primly in a private screening room, à la A Clockwork Orange.

Clarke tackled more overtly the situation in Northern Ireland with the 1985 TV film Contact. Here the viewer is constantly on the shoulder of a platoon of British paratroopers as it patrols across the 'bandit country' of Crossmaglen, along Northern Ireland's border with the Republic of Ireland. This was an area where nearly two hundred members of the security forces were killed during the little war that was not a war, which we call 'The Troubles' in our euphemistic way.

What little dialogue there is is mostly of a purely functional nature - mission briefings, commands, acknowledgements. No plucky Tommy nattering to his mate in the foxhole here. Instead you notice the prevailing atmosphere of tension building up, that concentration in the eyes, as the men spend endless hours walking up and down hills, through woods and along hedgerows, perhaps hoping to catch some bad guys at it, definitely hoping not to get caught by the bad guys. But 'bad guys' maybe suggests Clarke is taking sides, which if he is - for either side - he hides pretty well. No, we're led through the hour-long drama from the point of view of the British squaddie, but there's no attempt to validate or invalidate any particular political argument, just to illustrate the long stretches of bag-humping and tramping around, periodically punctuated by short bursts of violent intensity, that is the life of the lowly soldier.

And the short bursts of violent intensity are most effective; I wouldn't want to give too much away, but even though you don't really get to know any of the soldiers (thanks to the largely wordless script), the viewer does get sucked into the trauma of the patrol. The emotional connection the viewer finds with the film seems largely down to the platoon's officer, played with hard-eyed intensity by Sean Chapman. Because there is so little dialogue, and what little there is is entirely without self-reference (except in two small instances), the audience has no idea whether the officer is good, bad or indifferent at his job, or whether his men like or respect him particularly. This frees us up from the conventions of the war movie, and so we find ourselves reading the story in Chapman's eyes, which say much more than his words. Clarke conspires on this front, structuring the whole play mostly around scenes of the patrol out in country, contrasted with brief, back-at-barracks moments, where Chapman retires to his tiny room, closes the door, and sits silently, staring into nothing. So it is then that out in the field, it is Chapman's eyes, and where, at what, how he is looking, that guide the viewer. And through the film, his eyes become colder, cloudier, darker, with what he has seen and what he has not.

Aside from Chapman (whom you may remember as the greenhouse rapist from the theatrical Scum), John Blundell (another Scum graduate, Pongo Banks) is on hand as a dependable corporal. He is our second point of contact with the platoon, at a further remove from us than the officer, yet still more in focus than the squaddies, who, whilst no less rounded as characters, no less important as people, are never brought to the fore of our consciousness, except as recipients of orders of the officer - or else as targets for the IRA. This reflects the authorship of the film: it was written by AFN Clarke, based on his own experiences as an army officer in Northern Ireland. The platoon is the responsibility of the officer, and Chapman expresses this with the timbre of his voice, his physical language, with his still gaze and with his darting eyes.

The corporal's dramatic function, by contrast, appears to be that of observer within the cast, mirroring the screen audience in his own watching of Chapman. The order-giving, order-taking hierarchical structure of the military being what it is, Blundell's closer proximity to the men than Chapman's is implicit throughout, heightening the sense of Chapman's isolation, and the burden of responsibility he must carry as the toll of duty weighs ever-heavier on the men of the patrol.

Perhaps the final scene - the handheld camera dropping from above Chapman's head to below it looking up into his face, as he sits silently on his bed in his room after the end of the patrol, arms wrapped tight around his body, hand clamped over his mouth, simultaneously comforting, protecting and silencing himself - is Clarke's money-shot, symbolism-wise. We look again into Chapman's eyes, to find meaning in what has passed before it, yet we cannot see anything, because his eyes are in shadow. Black screen, The end.

A powerful film, one which holds together as a whole and which demonstrates, by way of contrast with the less satisfying but wordier Psy-Warriors, that talk can be cheap.

And from the few words of Contact to the virtually silent Elephant (1989), another TV film considering 'The Troubles'. Well, it's not silent, but there is no audible dialogue, bar a single short moment halfway into the film. Instead the foley is whacked up to eleven, and you find your ears ringing with loud footsteps as across eighteen scenes in thirty-seven minutes, you bear witness to twenty murders, completely without context.

A man walks along a street, crosses the road, enters a municipal building. He wanders through a corridor, through doors and we see he is in the public baths. He walks around the empty swimming pool, pausing at the changing cubicles at the poolside as he passes, completing a full circuit, then leaving. He moves down a different corridor - a passage with bathrooms off it. He walks to the end, where a door is open. A older man in workclothes is mopping the bath. He turns around. He sees the man, and the gun he is pointing at him. He is shot, not a word spoken. The gun man turns around, walks back down the passageway, turns right and leaves the building. The camera turns back at the dead janitor. It is a still life, except slight tremours in the frame, and the muffled sounds from outside the baths, betray that time moves on, if not for the old man, who is dead, still dead.

And with this first murder - not explained by words, symbols, captions, just an anonymous man killing another anonymous man - Elephant begins. The killing takes place within two minutes of the title caption, yet within four minutes we will have borne witness to a second, similarly unexplained killing; within six minutes a fourth; within ten minutes, a fifth, a sixth; and so on, the cadavers piling up, and us the audience never knowing who, or why, these men are killed, or by whom.

Factories, workshops, warehouses, taxi offices, garages, car parks, even a football pitch, all are backdrops for these wordless assassinations. Each time the same thing: a man walks along, and either shoots another man, or is himself shot. The sometimes shuddering steadicam then follows the killer awhile in his calm, slow escape, before returning to linger over the corpse he has delivered, and then leaping to another locale, another man walking, another dead man still breathing.

Occasionally the pattern is broken - a double killing, three men together (which one shall die?), a team of killers prowling - but the film keeps its deadly rhythm, footsteps, footsteps, footsteps, bang-bang-you're-dead. Until the moment the gun is drawn (a revolver, a sawn-off, an automatic pistol, a pump-action shotgun), you are not quite sure who is predator and who is prey. Instinctively your sympathies are with the victim, but still... Who is he? Why was he shot down, so coldly?

The camera is complicit in every crime, because it knows a death is in the air, it lingers after the climax, so you the viewer are guilty by association, the witness who stands by, does nothing. Or perhaps it is the guilt of helplessness; murder on murder on murder, and there is nothing you can do. Or is it a darker guilt - here you are, following, watching: did you direct these killings, are they in your name? Clarke and his writer Bernard MacLaverty give no clues in the narrative, because in essence the narrative is in the unrelenting death, no more. Motive is stripped away. Context is removed. Behind is left only the tears yet to come, tears over a cold body, farewells that came too late, and another death, somewhere else.

The last killing hints at the harvest yet to come. After a four minute walk through a large, strip-lit, empty factory complex, two men meet a third. What we have seen before leads us to believe that these are a pair of assassins and he is their target; but without a word, the man on the left gently turns his colleague around so he faces the wall, whereupon the third man steps forward and shoots him through the back of the head. There has been no panic, no coercion that we can see, no struggle, as killer is killed. Is this betrayal, or is it simply the utter acceptance that comes from seeing too much, knowing no way out? Whatever the meaning in that final finality, I'm sure Clarke and MacLaverty were not thinking of it as a happy ending, full of third act closure and lessons learned. This was 1989, twenty years since the arbitrary beginning of The Troubles. A generation of anonymous, senseless killings, and still the same grey clouds over the same redbrick houses, the same wet-roofed hangars, the same misty parks.

The film was significant enough that Hollywood auteur Gus Van Sant appropriated its name and much of its tone and style for his own meditation on senseless slaughter, 2003's Elephant. However, whilst it retains the visual mode of Clarke's film, with long, lingering tracking shots which follow protagonists around a real location, and whilst it too largely eschews the traditional owned or shared narrative in favour of disconnected points of view, the Van Sant film remains a far more conventional film. We are presented with clear contexts for the actions of the killers in this film, a pair of troubled teens called Alex and Eric. We see them bullied, we see their outsider status within the social hierarchies of the school, and moreover we see their victims, and to a certain degree, get to know them, before they are killed. In this way the audience is clearly invited to empathise with those killed, and with the killers. It is the token of 'understanding'.

Consider also the structure: yes, there are long tracking shots, following predator, following prey - but these are not decontextualised, discrete moments captured, they are interconnected moments, converging and diverging and then converging again, different minutes in the same hour. Contrast this with the Clarke film, where the viewer is robbed of any sense of meaning, presented only with the cold body that comes out of the barrel of a gun. The Van Sant film instead offers the audience the opportunity of picking sides. Perhaps that girl deserved it, she is, after all, a nasty piece of work; that boy definitely got what was coming to him. The way we consider the killers too becomes a choice - either you think that this is what happens when you push people over the end, that Alex and Eric were in some way justified; or you think, what a pair of spoilt brats. The context, limited as it is, seems actually to confuse things far more than the vacuum existing in the Clarke film, where the reaction is largely a visceral one, a feeling of being numbed by the unrelenting carnage. After all, in the Clarke Elephant, we don't know who is loyalist and who is republican, who is protestant and who is catholic. We see only the killer and the killed. But in the Van Sant Elephant, because we know who is doing the killing, whom they are killing, and (facile though the reasons may be) why they are killing, the film slots neatly into a standard three act play format, the artistic misdirection notwithstanding. It's a well-made piece of work, but I feel Clarke achieved something in his thirty-seven minutes of screen time (his penultimate film) that Van Sant - and most other filmmakers - search for across their entire careers and never find.

Alan Clarke was born in Birkenhead on the 28th October 1935, and he died from cancer in London on the 24th July 1990.

This is a sequential montage I've made of the twenty men murdered in Elephant. I've uploaded a larger version to my main Flickr if you be wanting one.

Linkies:

• Alan Clarke biography at Screenonline (BFI)
• Blue Underground (publishers of 5-disc Alan Clarke Collection, featuring Made In Britain, Scum (both versions), The Firm and Elephant, plus Director: Alan Clarke, a documentary disc)
• DVD Outsider review of the Alan Clarke Collection
• Sense Of Cinema article on Alan Clarke
• Alan Clarke on IMDb

Since I've been going on about faces rather a lot (more on BODIES, soon), I couldn't very well fail to mention this little chap, Aleksei Kravchenko, in COME AND SEE, which I re-saw recently at a screening I put on at Screen Academy Scotland.

(Screening this film is problematic: I was approached by more than one person with the question, "What are you showing tonight?" and when I replied, "Come and See," they'd say, "But what are you showing?" and the whole thing turned into a protracted Abbott & Costello routine.)

Elem Klimov's astonishingly powerful and horrific WWII movie is another of those films which is relentlessly dark and negative, but never becoems depressing. One emerges glad to be alive. A big part of the film's power comes from the extraordinary central performance by young Kravchenko, whose commitment to the role of a young partisan fighting the Nazis in Belarus was so strong that Klimov and his crew  feared for the boy's sanity. Although Klimov's humanitarian impulses were not strong enough to prevent him from, like William Wellman in his 30s gangster films, using live ammo...

Anyhow, the face is eloquent, what I call a PROFOUND FACE, and the performance powerful, and at times Kravchenko looks like a bad drawing (like I might draw) of my nephew Calum, which also intensifies my emotional responses... although what we really get is the Universal Face of Suffering Humanity, filtered through the specifics of a single person's features. 

The makeup is also hugely important, as the hero's shattering experiences gradually give him the weathered face of an old man...

Klimov's wife, Larissa Shepitko, directed THE ASCENT, which is maybe the ultimate film about the Eastern Front, whereas Klimov's movie is more of a descent into Hell than an altogether realistic portrait of a campaign, but the effect is of an engrossing psychological realism, with the commitment to P.O.V. maintained relentlessly: when the boy is deafened by exploding shells, the soundtrack is engulfed by a droning, ringing tinnitus effect that continues, slowly fading, for the next half hour of screen time. Compared to this, those moments in SAVING PRIVATE RYAN where Tom Hanks' hearing is affected are like the Tom & Jerry version.

Klimov's heavy use of steadicam reminds me of another film of sweeping movement towards death, acts of violence we don't want to see but are driven ineluctably towards: the BBC play ELEPHANT, written by Bernard MacLaverty, directed by Alan Clarke.