CITIES AND YEARS

“What you need to understand,” says Kurt, “is that you are the enemy!” – The quintessential message of this emotional duel between two former friends, once brothers in arms as members of the international battalion in the 1919 struggle for Petrograd, is that one has to decide in favour of a class, namely that of the workers, soldiers, peasants. Based on Fedin’s first novel, Chervyakov’s last silent film retains the complex plot structure, the interwoven temporal planes, the tapestry of figures. The additional ingredient is existentialism. Psychological sketches on celluloid – subtle, almost lyrical, a world away from heroic narrative.