Boy leaves girl

Летят журавли (Letyát zhurávli—The Cranes Are Flying) 1957 U.S.S.R. Mosfil'm

(95 minutes) directed by Mikhail Kalatozov; cinematography by Sergei Urusevsky; edited by Mariya Timofeyeva.

A young couple in love dance along a Moscow river embankment early one summer morning as they return to their parents’ apartments after spending the night out walking city streets.

The opening shot would make for a classic start to any Hollywood love story.

It is a lovely long take: the embankment barrier bisects the frame diagonally, rising from the lower right corner and following the river’s bend in a long lazy curve from left back to right, through a distant bridge centered near the top of the frame. A young woman runs into the lower frame, leans over the barrier and scissor kicks her legs in the air, centered in the frame. A young man follows and takes her hand; they skip away from the camera, along the embankment up the left side of the frame.

This must have surprised and delighted Soviet audiences seeing this movie for the first time: a ‘boy and girl’ alone in the heart of the capital, light and happy, officially sanctioned and free of political content or reference, after two decades of the leaden fog of Stalinism.

Then the camera picks up the couple from a reverse angle, entering the frame as they near the bridge. When they stop to catch a breath, the girl—Veronika ‘Belka’ [Squirrel] (Tatiana Samoilova)—sees a ‘V’ of cranes overhead and recites a ‘chastushka,’ a couplet that conveys more in sound than in sense, and might sound to English speakers like a nursery rhyme:

‘Zhurávliki-korábliki letyát pod nebesámi, i byéli-ye, i syéri-ye, i s’dlínnymi nosámi,’ or ‘Cranes like little ships/Sailing through the skies/Some white, some grey/And some with long beaks fly!’*

A passing truck watering the street sprays the couple. They continue their romp, in part through a park on the grounds of the Kremlin.

Later that day, public loudspeakers broadcast that Nazi Germany has invaded the U.S.S.R. It is June 22, 1941. The Second World War has just begun in Russia.

The story is simple. The ‘boy’—Boris Borozdin (Alexei Balatov)—and his factory coworkers immediately volunteer in the Red Army to turn back the Nazi menace. Boy leaves girl.

Before long, Borozdin is missing in action. The audience would have known all too well that few of the pitiably ill-trained, ill-equipped hundreds of thousands of eager young patriots whom Soviet dictator Josef Stalin threw at the rapidly advancing Wehrmacht in the opening months of the war made it back to their loved ones.

When Veronika’s parents are killed in an air raid on Moscow, Borozdin’s father, Fedor Ivanovich (Vasily Merkuriev), a physician, invites her to live with his family. Veronika ends up giving in to the importunities of Boris’ cousin Mark (Alexander Shvorin), a classical pianist curiously exempted from military service, also living in the family apartment. Veronika marries Mark.

The family is evacuated to Siberia for the duration of the war, where Fedor Ivanovich heads a hospital. His daughter Irina (Svetlana Kharitonova) is a doctor and Veronika works as a nurse. The war ends. Boris never comes home.

Again, it is hard to imagine what Soviet audiences thought when this film, a powerful and beautifully made work of art in its own right, first ran in theatres in the fall of 1957.

It was the first time people in a country which sacrificed so much in that war had seen naturalistic stories of real people who took part in it, similar to what American audiences saw in films such as William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Prior to this had been only bombastic ideological cheerleading for the Motherland and its Great Leader to which Soviet citizens had become inured.

The history aside, what makes this the first great Soviet classic set during the country’s ‘Great Fatherland War’ is a terrific cast in a great story set in momentous events that many people had experienced—not to mention exciting and imaginative camera work and editing that makes the movie fun to watch.

After the opening scene along the Moskva River, there is an energetic tracking shot of Boris bounding up the broad five-story flight of stairs to Veronika’s parents’ apartment—a scene that recurs in a fantasy sequence at a poignant moment later in the film.

In several instances, the director and cinematographer get a lovely effect shooting their subjects from a dolly on overcast days against broad wet Moscow pavement,which gives them animated liquid shadows.

There are also two remarkable scenes in which a well edited combination of hand-held shots amid the crowd and crane shots right above it follow Veronika through crowded streets. The first is when she races to try to catch up with Boris at the collection point before he leaves the city. The second is when she hurries to meet a train of soldiers returning to Moscow after the end of the war, hoping against hope that Boris will return to her.  

The scene in which Mark overcomes Veronika’s resistance is passionately gothic: Mark pounds out a romantic piece dedicated to Veronika on a grand piano high in a city building, recklessly exposed to the perils of a night air raid after Veronika refuses to shy from her parents’ fate. 

Later, in Siberia, an imaginative sequence of combined tracking shots shows Veronika running through snow after a train, possibly to throw herself under it like Anna Karenina. One camera tracks her through a storm fence and another up-from-under just in front of her; then she clatters up steps to a bridge crossing the railroad tracks, leaning over the railing into the passing engine’s belching black smoke.

Veronika’s ‘chastushka’ gives her solace during the war; at the end of her run through crowd in the final scene, a bystander points to a flight of cranes overhead in skies to which peace has returned.

*Журавлики-кораблики летят под небесами,

И белые, и серые, и с длинными носами!