One hard day. Magnificent and innovative for its time psychological and concise film about war and occupation, duty and betrayal, violence and the situation of the occupied population, largely anticipating many films of the 1970s-1980s, especially in Belarusian and Lithuanian cinema. Perhaps it is worth including in the top ten films about the war and definitely worth watching.
The main plot is simple, but difficult to execute. Two guerrillas, Sorovy and Andrei, go to install explosives under the railway bridge, and after placing them, lie all day waiting for a suitable train. Andrey was wounded in the forest, on the way to the bridge, but initially hides it, and when he confesses to his partner, it is not clear how to evacuate him. They lie in the bushes by the river, exactly opposite the house with security. And the train has to be blown up. As a result, they lie all day, during this time different scenes unfold before their eyes, in some they are forced to take part (kill a German gathered to shit them literally on their heads, ask the family of a peasant who came to mowing at the railway tracks to help take Andrew out).
Other stories the authors show outside of this place – this is the “bad day” of the Latvian peasant Olia, whom her husband persuades to help with the removal of the wounded, the small son wants to participate in this, and almost immediately comes to her sister, who is blackmailed, under the threat of murder of Olia and her family, is forced to marry a local policeman, with whom they were recently both in the same class and in the same Komsomol organization. Meanwhile, the son, running on the road, and brings trouble, refusing to obey the order of the German officer to bring water.
In short, a slow and hot day in which the atmosphere heats up as before a thunderstorm, ends with the death of Andrei, the thunder of the train wheels under which the girl sends her obsessive boyfriend and a shower of automatic queues of the Sever. And then, of course, the undermining of that very echelon. The Latvian people in the person of the same head of the family with his son in all this history remains an observer, sympathetic to the pro-Soviet partisans.
A great camera, great actors and a perfectly nuanced script are attached.
Author Nikolai Mitrokhin