| I used to wonder why DVDs often have the film’s original theatrical trailer as a standard "extra," but now that I’ve seen Prisoner of the Mountains and its accompanying trailer, I know: it’s the director’s way of explaining why his film was a commercial failure. That and the rather silly cover image, which I assume is derived from the North American poster, suggest that this gently beautiful film about good people getting killed was marketed as a cross between a Bruce Willis action movie and a Roberto Benigni tearjerker. Which in a way it is, but that’s no excuse.
Two Russian soldiers, a swashbuckling veteran (Oleg Menshikov) and a timid recruit (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), are captured in the Caucasus (could be Chechnya, could be Afghanistan) and held by an old peasant who hopes to exchange them for his imprisoned son. The days pass and they reach a deeper understanding of each other’s culture and humanity. The story is apparently adapted from Tolstoy, which shows how little the world changes, except, of course, that no one ever tried marketing his books to bored 15-year-old TV junkies.
There are, by and large, two kinds of war films – those centred on things and people blowing up, and those centred on things and people waiting to be blown up. The first type assume we are most alive when we act, the second that it is our reflections upon past and future acts that make us who we are. And these two philosophies naturally lead to two different types of prison movies – those that see the prison as an obstacle to be overcome through escape, and those that see it as an opportunity for unhurried thought. No points for guessing which of these various camps Prisoner of the Mountains falls in to.
Yet it is not a dense or particularly philosophical film: war is hell, life is beautiful, and that pretty much sums things up. As is usual in European cinema, it excels in quiet character development. It starts with the usual clichés – the Russians have soul and the peasants have dignity – but unlike the films of Willis and Benigni, it doesn’t stop there.
Prisoner of the Mountains not only sketches the subtly contrasting personalities on both sides of the conflict, but also the mechanisms that have locked them into their roles – a great war movie in exactly the way that Tears of the Sun was not. |
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