../the-cranes-are-flying

1. Visual
I have mentioned this before in previous reviews, but I am a black-and-white film photographer on the side. I have very little experience in taking color photographs besides using a point-and-shoot to document travel and vacations and that sort of thing. When I am trying to do a more formal "project" with my photography, I have always chosen black-and-white, and the reason is because I find dealing with the dimension of color to be uniquely distracting and challenging (no shade to color photographers of both the analog and digital variety, what I'm describing is a limitation I have because I'm not very good at this sort of thing and not a normative statement on photography in general). Unintentionally, this practice has given me a really strong appreciation for black-and-white movies! I feel very in tune with the directorial vision of a film when it's in black-and-white. I notice interesting lighting more often and in more subtle parts of the film when I'm watching something in black-and-white, and I appreciate shot composition a lot more easily as well. Thus, I felt right at home here in The Cranes Are Flying.

I think a particular favorite sequence of mine is in Siberia, when Veronika runs away from the hospital overwhelmed with guilt. There's these sequences where she's running alongside this railing and it creates this visual effect where the environment around her is frantically moving, and then it cuts and the camera is suddenly pointing down to her legs and you just see them flailing about as she sprints away, and then we cut back to the more observing camera angle where now there's dead winter trees meshed with the railing and then cut back to the angle where now it's looking straight up at Veronika's head instead of down to her feet, and you see the fingers of the dead branches above her head.

Another stunning visual, Mark carrying his prey over a floor covered in broken glass after surviving the air raid. The air raids in this movie are intense and horrific in different ways. The first time, we only see the aftermath as Veronika scrambles to go home to check on her parents, who stubbornly refuse to go to the subway shelter together. This is one of many moments where I was begging to know how they made this sequence. Did they build a set of a neighborhood somewhere and blow it up themselves for the shoot? It's haunting and dramatic and looked so real to me. Later on a second air raid happens, but this time it's Mark and Veronika who are inside, and what transpires is somehow even more sinister. I think there's something here about the value of closeness when it comes to depicting warfare and mass destruction and death. I've seen so many superhero movies where assumed-empty buildings are leveled on the streets and they have never had the kind of impact this movie will have on you when a screeching loud air siren blasts through the theater, and then the glass explodes on the windows and in the middle of it all a man is trying to coerce and overpower a woman while they both cling to each other to survive the blasts.

Most impressively, however, is these shots in these huge, dense crowds with tons of people moving around frantically looking for their loved ones. I don't really know the details of making movies, but how do you even block these kinds of scenes? Maybe it's easier than it looks, I don't know, but the movie is book-ended by these two enormous scenes where at the beginning, a huge crowd of people is massed together trying to say goodbye to the young men who are about to march off to their likely deaths in war. At the end, we have a similar crowd greeting the victorious living as they return home from the front. In both cases, we follow one character, Veronika, as she weaves and wades through this mass of people to try to find her love, Boris. I think it's stunning when movies have this kind of visual poetry to their composition and to their sequencing, and it was something I was able to notice in this film.

2. Character
It makes sense that this movie is an adaptation of a play, and a good play at that. All the characters are immediately well-defined in multiple dimensions from their first introduction in the film. Boris and Veronika are lovers, the established nickname that Boris has for Veronika immediately tells us they are deep in their love, but the sneaking around at the beginning also tells us that something is holding them back from just getting married. Mark, Boris's cousin, is introduced to us when he goes to meet Veronika in Boris's place after the war and the impending draft is announced. He casually lays his hands on her, and with a little ego announces to her that he will be able to avoid the draft. Everything that follows between Boris, Veronika, and Mark is laid out in these introductory moments.

Perhaps the character with the most ambiguity is our dear Veronika. We know in the first 10 minutes that Boris works at the factory, we see how he is beloved by his comrades and has a strong sense of duty and loyalty. Mark is doomed to be despised by the audience as it is exceedingly obvious that he views Veronika as a prize to be claimed, with no respect for her as a person. Both these types can find a way through war. Boris volunteers for combat, and fulfills his duty to nation and people. Mark gets an exception (the details of which we will later learn about) and connives his way to coasting through at home. Veronika, however, is flitting and capricious and playful. She has a personality that seems unfitting for the hardship and danger of wartime. And this manifests in her missing both the goodbye dinner for Boris and missing him at the square to give him his goodbye present (a bunch of cookies and sweets, perhaps the reason why she was late to dinner in the first place). so we have our central drama and tension. Yes, the movie is about Veronika and her struggle between loyalty and resignation (represented by Boris and Mark, respectively), but it is primarily a movie about a woman's struggle with herself. Well, it's about that and one other thing...

3. Communism (and an argument with my dad)
Ok this is the part of the review essay where it gets maybe a little silly, but I'm going to have a pretend argument with my dad here. My dad is a Chinese immigrant from Communist China. He was born basically right at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and he left his family and his community to become a civil engineer in the United States and to raise his family here. I feel like maybe I'm going through a dad crisis or something with my movie watching because I've been thinking about him a lot with a lot of movies I've seen, but this one definitely brought up a specific thing from my dad, which is his extreme suspicion of all art that is produced by communist countries as being propaganda.

And I want to be clear, I don't agree with my dad on this thing (we disagree about most things). I think if movies from communist countries that have censorship boards and script oversight should be written off, so should basically every American made movie be written off when they fellate the U.S. Military so they can put big ol' airplanes and guns in their films. (This is why Moonfall was sick, because it was an english-language film where the Chinese Space Agency saves the day. That's the kind of selling out we like to see!) There is no pure or apolitical movie. Movies that come from a system of capitalism will normalize and uplift certain assumptions that are not universally neutral elements, but are actually intricately tied to the system itself. I don't want to write off any movies just because they aren't some fantasy of pure, unadulterated human expression. Unless the movie is made by 1 person who is directing, acting, and doing all the lighting and all the other jobs on set at the same time, no movie exists that wasn't part of a process of some kind of collective transformation, that probably involved some level of compromise.

4. Communism (and the ending of the movie)

So in the spirit of trying to understand this movie politically, let's contextualize it just a little bit. It stands to reason that The Cranes Are Flying was probably revelatory for an audience that was only a couple decades removed from the end of the Great Patriotic War, and only a few years removed from the death of Stalin himself. That little fact alone is probably critical to understand this film politically, as Stalin's death resulted in immediate changes to much of Soviet policy both foreign and domestic. I'm not a historian so I don't know enough details to make definitive claims in this review, but it would not surprise me if this movie was something that could not have existed in this form in the Stalinist regime (and I found a quote from Russian movie critic Victor Matizen that this film in particular annoyed Khrushchev because of Veronika's decision regarding Mark).

All that is to say, I find the ending of this film to be profoundly beautiful. It's the part of the movie that reads as the most aspirational for the spirit of socialism. For the first 80ish minutes, our view of the conflict and turmoil is narrow and small. When houses are blown up, we are moved because it is Veronika's house, specifically, that has been reduced to rubble. When all the men are marching away to become soldiers in this horrible war, our feelings go towards the one woman who is so close to saying goodbye to one man as they are together surrounded by dozens of people crying, hugging, dancing, cheering, yelling, screaming, sobbing. When we hear about the hurt and rage of these injured soldiers who have come home to discover that their loves have betrayed them and married other men, we feel that sting with one woman in particular who is hearing their stories, whose sense of guilt is building and building and building.

But at the end, when the survivors jubilantly arrive home, and the woman of our attention is walking through throngs of people overjoyed with relief, herself tensed and wound like a spring, hoping for one last chance to see her beloved, a chasm opens underneath her. Boris is dead. Stepan, another soldier from the factory and a friend of Boris, is the one who resolves the mystery. She knows with certainty now. What was the point of her life, up to this point, then? What was the point of these optimistic flowers in her hand, mocking her for her arrogant belief that she might reunite with her love, like so many people around her?

But before she can run away to the oblivion she once wished for back in Siberia, she is interrupted by a speech from Stepan, vowing to the crowd (and to the audience) that they shall never forget the dead and never again allow such a grief as war. Afterwards, a friendly older man turns to her and asks, "Why stand there? Give your flowers to whomever they're for." Veronika's gaze turns to the people around her and suddenly our own consciousness opens up to the surrounding people.

She starts by handing a flower to the old man.

There is so much life that exists in the background of this very intimate character drama, and the brilliance here, the "revelation" that the curators at the Beacon Cinema might have been thinking of when they put this movie in the calendar to end their Pillars of Beacon program, is that you don't really understand it until this moment right at the end. Veronika's story suddenly becomes one stitch in a tapestry of suffering, hurt, loss, and finally, reconciliation. Nothing happened to her that wasn't also happening to women all around her, just like nothing happened to Boris that wasn't also happening to all the men around him. For the last hour I had been watching a movie about one woman and these two very different men in her life, and in the last minutes I felt as if the world opened to me. We are not just lonely ships at sea! We are not alone in our suffering! The death of a single man, the heartbreak of a single woman, they weigh on the whole community surrounding these wretches of fate. And thus our return home, our reprisal, and our reconnection must also be communal.

At this point Veronika starts walking again, but this time to hand out flowers to all the people near her. People who are hugging and kissing and laughing with overflowing abundance are surprised with a gift, and they smile warmly in thanks. Veronika even starts to smile back. I remember thinking to myself, "oh, she is handing away her grief, one flower at a time." Then, someone calls out, and we finally see the cranes flying over Moscow. Boris’s father meets with Veronika and they look to the sky as the camera pans up, a mass of people all together in bittersweet happiness. Fade to black. Roll credits.

This movie is monumental. It so clearly demarcates a specific place and time and also transcends those boundaries with ease. I cried multiple times while watching this movie, and parts of this review made me cry to write! It’s a powerful story, with powerful images, with a deeply empathetic soul that reveals itself masterfully to you in its final 5 minutes. I loved this movie so very much.