European Films

Men and women, fascists and communists battle it out in the titular village of newcomer Artem Antonov’s Russian WWII tale Polumgla, a work that effectively toys with genre expectations and delivers both genuine pathos and genuine laughs. Set in the midst of winter, two Russian supervisors are sent on a tower-building mission near a small village that the war has gutted of able men. To do the hard work, they have been assigned a team of German Prisoners of War. With Antonov’s able direction, the winning script, handsome production values and affable cast, Polumgla could light up some arthouse and festival screens in the Occident if marketed well.

 

Patriotic and baby-faced soldier Anokhin (Yuri Tarasov) escapes from the war hospital, hoping to be sent back to the front where he can kill many a fascist dog. Instead, he ends up being appointed the supervisor of an entire pack of German Prisoners of War, none of which can be shot if he is to complete his mission: construct a radio tower in the northern taiga to aid allied airplanes on their flights. They are still on their way to Polumgla when Anokhin has already wounded one of his prisoners because his harmonica playing reminded him of a German Nazi bastard at the front who played the instrument with one hand whilst killing Anokhin’s friends with the other.

 

The message is clear: this will be a bumpy ride. Starting as a conventional war-time drime, Antonov changes gears with an expertly shot and edited sequence involving two baggage sleighs that cave through the ice on a frozen lake. The scene seems to indicate that the film will enter the action-adventure territory; only the first of the many genre changes that the film seamlessly includes in its narrative.

 

The inhabitants of Polumgla (women, children and elderly) are hostile towards the new arrivals: they await them at the entrance of the village with pitchforks and angry grimaces. After much haggling, Anokhin knows how to secure a dilapidated farm for his workers to spend the night, though they almost freeze to death (the roof is all but gone). Slowly but steadily however, the women of the village thaw towards their unwanted visitors, perhaps realising that the construction of the tower might in the long run speed up the end of the war and the return of their husbands, even though the number of visits from the postman who delivers the dreaded names of new “heroes fallen for the fatherland” seem to increase every week.

 

Moscow considers the German Prisoners of War as nothing more than slaves. When Anokhin is asked over the radio how many of them have died during the first period of construction, he answers: “None,” to which the voice from Moscow replies: “Then you are doing something wrong”. The Germans might be Prisoners of War, but they are not stupid: slowly most of them enter into a silent agreement with a (potential) war widow to have their meagre diet supplemented by a few extra bites of home-cooked food in exchange for work in and around the house that has fallen behind because of the absence of men (including, in some cases, romantic chores).

 

Anokhin notices, but his humanity is bigger than his sense of rigid discipline. In this section, the film morphs into a potent mix of comedy and romance, with several excellent and very funny set pieces that are cunningly mixed with scenes that bring the strong emotions of wartime prisoners and widows to the surface.

 

The idyll can of course not last, and the film goes out with a bang of reality that hits home hard. Antonov is not afraid to work within genre conventions, but what sets Polumgla aside is that it seemingly switches gears from one genre to the other several times without feeling ever feeling incoherent. Polumgla has that little bit of everything that will assure a wide appeal.