Impossible There are not many films in the world cinema that so accurately and subtly interpret the war seen and lived by a non-military man. For a boy of nine, living in a remote Armenian hometown, too young to fight and too old to play war and dream of exploits, war is a long yearning. It is a quiet depopulated city, from which life, joy, the ability to speak loudly and laugh seem to flow. This city doesn't even seem to have been bombed. But he is also bruised by war - sick, silent, dilapidated, very poor. On its empty streets, only a few boys laugh and play. But the little hero of the film is not with them, he is younger than his comrades, but already older than them. And he has a business: waiting for his father, to whom the funeral came, waiting against common sense, stubbornly, silently, without explaining anything to anyone. Meet the trains, endure the ridicule and grumbling of the station chief - and silently walk the darkened, rain-drenched streets home.
However, the boy does not have a real home - the father died, and the beautiful mother got together with another man, became pregnant, and her brother, who returned from the front without a leg, saving family honor, drove her to the other, burned her house and took her nephew to him. The burnt skeleton of the house, which at first seems to be a memory of the war, is all that the little hero left from his childhood. A boy comes to these ruins alone. He must have been very happy here once. He's not crying - he's already big. He's only 9 or 10 years old and the war has been going on forever. He already knows that there is no romance in war - only the long pain that has shackled him and everyone around him.
He lives with his one-legged uncle and aunt. My aunt is kind, and my uncle always tells other people’s military stories and drinks. He never reached the front - he became a cripple in the bombed echelon. And he's ashamed of it. That’s why he recounts military tales heard from others in the hospital, as if it had happened in a war with himself. He can no longer work - what can a one-legged peasant do? And he's ashamed of that too. He secretly knits mittens or socks, which he then sells as handicrafts of his wife - and the wife does the man's work. And he is ashamed, he suffers, and he drinks.
All this film tells not at once and stingy words. There are few words and few actions in it, it is more a poem than a story. A few strokes, a couple of details, a casually dropped word - in this small rear city only in the edge, even conversations.
But, stingy with words and events, the film is full of images and feeling. He's amazingly poetic. Some shots – jets of rain, diagonally pouring silver rails into the distance; a disposed horse, slowly crossing in the distance; the face of a mother with a strand of hair falling on her cheek; two women carrying a long table covered with a white tablecloth to the wall – all this is pure poetry, poetry of fine and pure sound. And the painfully bitter climax of the film is the boy’s modest dream of the most cherished: that the father returns alive, that the murdered son of a neighbor returns, that on both legs he comes home cheerful as before, uncle, and that they all together smack bare feet grapes. Just this. Like before the war. I want my mother to be with my father. But this is such a simple, such an impossible desire, such a shining image of inaccessible happiness. Only in this scene does the sun seem to briefly come out from behind the clouds - and the sun is so much that in recollection this black and white, like the whole old film, scene seems colorful.
Watch this short film.
P.S. The credits say that the artistic director of this Armenian film was Andrei Tarkovsky. It is difficult to assess the degree of participation of this master in the picture – not a single monograph dedicated to Tarkovsky mentions “Tart grapes”. If you wish, you can guess his hand in the trademark Tarkov rains, in the images of horses, in the unromantic understanding of war as a tragedy. At the same time, no one would call this film another, “unknown”, Tarkovsky’s film – there is a very special, very peculiar, “tart” intonation, recognizable from other old Armenian films that I love, and the mixture of these principles, these different but equally poetic ways of perceiving the world, constitutes a separate, very valuable quality of this small, forgotten, subtle and sad work.
10 out of 10