| BaftaBaby |
Posted - 07/12/2007 : 09:38:31
Afghanistan's been a state since 1747, but its settlements go back over 50,000 years, representing some of the earliest evidence of farming and civilization. Rich in a variety of still un-mined minerals, its geography has placed it strategically between East and West, and ripe for invasion.
Fydor Bonderchuck sets his Afghani war story in the mid-1980s, the early years of glasnost. Significantly it coincides with the era that the Kremlin ordered his father Sergei, already a multi-award winning director, to become a member of the Communist Party or have his career cut short.
It's touching and telling that Fyodor dedicates the film to his late father who clearly influenced him as a film-maker. Bonderchuck senior died over ten years before 9th Company, but his legacy enriches this group portrait of a real-life platoon sent to guard an Afghanistan hill-post during the Soviet occupation of that war-torn land.
It's a tale of military brutality, humanity, bravery, poignency and ultimate futility. Bonderchuck also movingly plays one of the soldiers transported to an alien landscape of stark hills and underground rat-runs. He's not saying anything new about war, but his sure hand with scenes of action as well as those more personal illuminations allows him to engage us in this simple story set against the most complex of backdrops. Although he takes too long to do it, his underlying focus is on political change and its effects on human beings.
Bonderchuck's immersion in all aspects of film-making, including his partnership in a music video production company, assures the technical aspects of 9th Company. As the son and brother of an entire family of actors and filmmakers, his handling of the vulnerability of even the most brutal of his characters is handled delicately, with humour, and most of all with unsentimentalized humanity.
Yes, we've seen before how a group of strangers become bonded to create a fighting force willing to die for one another in the name of ... fill in the blank. But it's a tale that will need telling so long as besuited politicos sit at desks and sign papers that send young men to their deaths.
It's quite deliberate that Bonderchuck's Afghan enemies are rarely seen and never humanized, remaining implacably as one-dimensional as the straw-filled dummies of 9th Company's training ritual. Because this isn't a story of sides, it's a story of consequences. And, sadly, those remain the same whoever is doing the fighting. That the men of 9th Company were so forgotten, so ultimately betrayed by the very people who sent them to their doom is sadly also all-too familiar.
|
Looks good though.
