Aleksei German Ml. - Bumazhnyy soldat aka Paper Soldier (2008)

Kazakhstan, early 1961. Daniel Pokrovsky, a medical officer, currently works for the first Soviet cosmonauts’ troop. There Daniel, already married, finds himself in an incredibly complicated and yet tender relationship with a young girl, called Vera. Later Daniel goes back to Moscow where is in charge of the health of the future cosmonauts…







All three of Aleksei Alekseevich German’s feature films are set in the past, but they examine that past from an unusual and illuminating point of view. The Last Train (Poslednii poezd, 2003) saw the Second World War through the eyes of German soldiers abandoned in the snowy Russian wastes, Garpastum (2005) the dying years of the Russian Empire through the lives of young men who were obsessive about football. German’s ambitious and absorbing new film, The Paper Soldier, is set in the spring of 1961, in the period leading up to the first manned space flight, and is formally constructed in the manner of a countdown, with intertitles and the narrator’s voice announcing “Week 6,” “Week 5,” “Week 4”… But the Baikonur cosmodrome is represented as a place of bleak, muddy melancholy, where cows, sheep and horses roam. A statuesque camel watches disdainfully as locals attempt to trade successively in a portrait of Stalin artfully framed in light bulbs (colloquially known as “Lenin’s little lamps,”—lampochki Il´icha), a tin “officers’” bath, Bulgarian skirts and Yugoslav glasses which, the seller insists, are “better than Italian ones.” It is only at the end of the film that the viewer remembers that “Iura” and “German,” hitherto nondescript among a pack of potential cosmonauts, are Gagarin and Titov and destined to enter history as the first and second men in space. Even the epoch-making flight itself happens almost unnoticed in the depth of the frame, an unremarked backdrop to a personal tragedy unfolding in the foreground. (Kinokultura)









Сюжет разворачивается в антураже исторических событий: идёт подготовка к полёту в космос первого человека, во время которых и показана трагедия главного героя — врача Даниила Покровского, который работает в это время с советскими космонавтами, время от времени дымящими папиросами. Покровский оказывается между двух огней — он разрывается между двумя женщинами, которые его любят, и должен сделать непростой выбор между честью и совестью, между профессиональным долгом и зовом сердца. Этот выбор не только ставит под угрозу его образ в глазах коллег, близких людей, которые могут потерять к нему уважение, эта дилемма может стоить ему жизни и Даниил умирает во время подьема ракеты-носителя "Восток"(РН-1) с космонавтом Гагариным на борту.





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