"The Bridge on the River Kwai"
“The Bridge over the River Kwai” is one of the most significant anti-war dramas in its genre.
Anti-war does not mean pacifist. In the film there are no heart-wrenching scenes of battles, which were often sinned by Soviet-made cinema, designed to soften and soften the viewer, there are no angry philippines against the "fratricidal" war, military actions here are practically out of the picture - they are not interested in Lin. The focus of the director’s research is the automated models of behavior inherent in the army with its hierarchical structure, subordination, deification of the uniform, the cult of masculinity, contempt for the individual, and the fact that these models, it turns out, are able to change to the opposite under the influence of certain circumstances.
In the film, two worldviews collide, two different attitudes to life, reality, war. The protagonist is Commander Shears (actor William Holden), he is also - in the film's art system - a carrier of values with a plus sign (freedom, individualism, addiction to women and other "simple human pleasures"; his attitude to war can be summarized by a line from Joseph Brodsky "General!" Your cards are shit. I pass), and the antagonist is Colonel Nicholson (actor Alex Guinness), a British commander, a bearer of values with a minus sign (pedantism, fanatical adherence to discipline, laws and rules, willingness to sacrifice other people’s lives in the name of the principles of “gentleman and officer”). Throughout the film, we see the characters of these characters, their consciousness in development.
It is worth saying that in order to solve their purely aesthetic problems, the authors of the tape neglected the accuracy of correspondence to true events and characters, which expectedly caused accusations of distortion of facts; Lin, in particular, was reproached for slandering Philip Tusi, a lieutenant colonel of the British army, who was destined to be in Japanese captivity with the remains of his regiment and serve as a prototype screen colonel. (For reference, in 1943, a bridge was actually built by British and other prisoners of war to link Japan’s strategically important railway line from Japanese-allied Thailand to occupied Burma.) However, unlike the film and the book of the French writer Pierre Boole, the historical bridge connected the banks of the Makhlong River, not Khwe (Bul distorted the name). By the way, thanks to the film, Makhlong acquired legends, becoming the object of pilgrimage for foreign tourists, so that in the 60s, by order of the Thai government, one of its tributaries was called Khwyaei. If desired, the picture can really be criticized for many things: for showing the Japanese such hard-headed people who do not understand the engineering craft, while in practice everything was exactly the opposite, for “imperial”, “barrier” ignoring the local population, who died during the construction of the railway for 16 months from swamp fever, dysentery, hunger, etc., according to various estimates, about 100-150 thousand; the film was criticized for anti-British sentiments.
But Bridge over the River Kwai is not a documentary film of real events. Not thinking about the Second World War. Not an image of the nightmares of camp life with its filth, disease and violence. This is the verdict of a war-mongering military man. As an institution of class society, as a pillar of all power, it is satirical ridicule. And, oddly enough, the apology of working democracy in its Freudian-Marxist, Raychian interpretation – as a set of natural-labor relationships of people based on voluntariness and mutual assistance (whatever you say, in the background of disgraced screenwriters Carl Forman and Michael Wilson, for “connections with Communists” included in the “Black List” of Hollywood and deprived of the possibility of legal work in the homeland – “The Bridge” saw screens without specifying their names – the same good old Marxism; Foreman, who came from a working-class family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, was a member of the Communist Party of the United States for ten years.
After all, it is impossible not to admit that man is an unpleasant, sick and strange creature who likes to fight; but some social conditions aggravate his deadly instincts, others are potentially capable of numbing them. This is what is hidden, at a deep level, is intended to tell us a film full of mockery of militarism, whether it is Japanese, British or anything else.
Despite everything, the Bridge leaves an extremely bright impression. The first thing that catches the eye when watching the tape and that can alienate someone who considers himself a fan of a more “chamber” European art house from it is the signature Hollywood grandeur of the production depicted along with the academicism of the production. Indeed, contemporary critics called his epic films either too majestic and lush, or too cold and “technical”. However, if the large-scale and expensive Hollywood cinema today has no equal, then something fundamentally significant with the departure of such masters as David Lin, he definitely lost.
10 out of 10
Original
