Great Directing in: 'Zhenya, Zhenechka, and Katyusha'

Day 29: Film with Great Directing

“White Sun of the Desert” is such an iconic ‘Ostern’/Red Western (and favourite of Russian cosmonauts), it can be hard to believe that years before, its director Vladmir Motyl had so fallen from official graces with an earlier film, a comedy initially considered disrespectful to the memory of WWII. But audiences loved “Zhenya, Zhenechka, and ‘Katyusha’” or Женя, Женечка и «катюша» (1967), now considered to be one of the most beautiful Soviet films portraying the last few months of the Great Patriotic War, and it’s one of my favourites (making it my choice for today)! Lean, schoolboyish Zhenya Kolyshkin is a soldier in the moving Reactive Mortars (Katyusha) Division, but he’s hardly suited for war: Walter Mitty and Don Quixote in one, he’s hardly a soldier at all. Zhenya seems more at home in his daydreams, portrayed with gentle, sympathetic humour as he wanders in and out of his inner dialogue or imagined romantic/heroic feats in quiet Technicolour fantasy. The film seamlessly moves between this and the natural tension and drudge of army life with a dreamy detachment, with strong seasoned men and women moving through meadows and rolling hills bursting with spring flowers (and enemy troops, portrayed with sensitively mixed neutrality). We get luminous, blue-toned nights like my favourite scene (apparently inspired by real headlines at the time), when absent-minded Zhenya is tasked with bringing back their New Year home packages, stumbling through pristine snow on a moonlit night until he mistakenly enters the German camp (even if you don’t care to watch the whole film, this little scene is so worth it). Motyl keeps the tone mostly light, with its “Danish King Drops” musical theme and intertitles in the style of a children’s book. Maybe this is what makes it all the more a war picture for me, because even as the fight is almost over, Zhenya’s shocking loss of innocence is more tragic, more heartbreaking, more human. A lyrical ‘painting,’ as it’s sometimes called in Russian, a gem of storytelling Xo