Ballad of a Soldier is cinema in its most essential form. It is just as visual as it is narrative, and the film is designed to elicit an emotional connection with the material that would be impossible in any other art form. The movie depicts the USSR during World War II as a country destroyed by war. One character has lost a leg, while another his home. A child blows bubbles aimlessly into the stairwell of an apartment complex where a soldier's wife has taken a home with another man. A poor city girl hops trains to see her aunt. These characters are all encountered by the soldier in the title, an inadvertent hero we already know is dead from the opening scene, yet we follow anyway.
I haven't seen many films from the Soviet Union; besides Tarkovsky, I can't think of any Russian filmmakers off the top of my head. But Ballad of a Soldier moved me. There was propaganda here - every superior officer is strict but even-minded and kind, and the soldier hero himself is practically a saint. But there's also complexity, in the soldier's admission of fright, in the one-legged soldier's mixed emotions about returning home, and most of all in the mother's embrace of a son she will only get to see once more for a brief moment. The film could easily be dismissed as a sort of mirror image of America's tomb of the unknown soldier, an everyman story of the pride inherent in giving yourself over to God and Country. But it is so effortlessly made, so convincing in its emotional touchstones, and so poetic in its imagery of a war-torn nation, that it isn't easy to ignore. A really great movie.
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