#11
The Scotsman (UK)
23 March 2002
Russian war film hits raw nerve
BY CHRIS STEPHEN IN MOSCOW

ALEXEI Chadov is Russia's answer to Ewan McGregor: Same looks. Same attitude.

Only Chadov shoots back at the world not with a heroin needle but with a rocket launcher.

The unknown actor has been made a star by the biggest film to hit Russia for years - War, a battle film set in Chechnya.

Chadov plays the hero who is lean and mean but has a good heart, as he blows away "terrorists" by the fistful.

Predictably, the movie follows a standard plot - lone hero out to save girl kept prisoner in Chechen dungeon. But War comes with added twists.

First, the girl is British: early in the movie she is captured, together with her boyfriend - played by a British actor, Ian Kelly - while the characters are playing Shakespeare on a tour of neighbouring Georgia.

The British pair are a throwback to the real life British Chechen hostages, aid workers Camilla Carr and Jon James.

When Kelly's character is released, with orders to bring a oe40 million ransom for his colleague, he finds the mean Brits will not come up with the money.

Instead, he turns to his only friend, Chadov, a young soldier he met while a prisoner.

And the theme of art imitating life follows a familiar thread: The horrors on screen, as Chechens hack off heads, ears and fingers are all too real for most Russians: videos by Chechen warlords as they carry out these deeds have been captured and are regularly screened on Russian television.

Predictably, our hero's first task is to show his friend that liberal values and knowledge of Shakespeare are no substitute for being handy with a Kalashnikov.

The violence comes thick and fast, ending with a battle in which helicopter gunships roar in, killing Chechens by the dozen, over a heavy metal soundtrack.

The film is the brainchild of the nationalist director Alexei Balabanov, whose previous film, Brother, featured a disgruntled Russian with a grudge against the West going on a mammoth killing spree in Chicago.

War, sweeping the country just three weeks after its release, echoes the sentiments of the president, Vladimir Putin, about wiping out the Chechen "terrorists". But War is no mouthpiece for the Kremlin.

Instead, the authorities are shown as just another obstacle to our hero - with the army commanders unhelpful and the secret service in league with the terrorists.

In fact, the Chechens even get a good line, with one captor telling the hero that Russia will never win the war because "you are not fighting for your homeland".

And while the camera dwells lovingly on the combat scenes, they are at least more realistic than the Technicolor action scenes usually dished out by Hollywood.

The success of War is in fact a barometer of the national mood: One in which disenchantment with the fruits of democracy has seen even nationalism crumble before the altar of despair.

In the end the hero is betrayed - he rescues the girl but is jailed for killing Chechens while no longer a soldier.

His empty home life in a rundown Siberian town - rescued only by the attentions of his girlfriend - also touches a raw nerve.

Where Russian films were once uplifting, Balabanov's War is simply bleak. This bleakness and emptiness is the film's most powerful feature, and its most depressing. Its success says more about today's Russia than opinion polls ever can.