I just wanted to suggest my Summertime diary when you commewnted there too...
I watched it in bits and pieces over the course of several days...
Never a good thing... even commercial breaks are enough to spoil some films.
Oleg Menshikov played Oleg Menshikov
For me, there was a nice contrast between the naive recruit and the senior soldier (whose ability to get on with their captors is just the opposite), and didn't know Menshikov enough for that judgement :-)
I didn't really get the ending
I don't remember the ending all that well; I seem to recall a tragic ending with a suggestion of a new cycle of violence, and suffering mothers. (But I may confuse it with another film set in the region.) *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
So the senior officer has his throat slit for killing the shepard, but then he comes back, presumably as a ghost, to the younger one. At the end of the film, when the Chechen's son is killed, he takes the younger prisoner off to shoot him because he can't trade him anymore. You hear a gunshot, so you think he's dead. But then you hear a voice over of the younger officer talking about trying to remember all the wonderful friends he made while he was a prisoner, and how he tries to remember them. Is he dead or alive? I want to believe the old man didn't shoot him.
The little girl is also absolutely adorable. I really enjoyed the scenery. I want to go there before I die...
I don't know, I think Menshikov was playing the same romantic, clownish -in a good way-, but "I'm terribly sorry I have to kill you now" guy he played in Burnt by the Sun. He seemed a bit cosmopolitan and effete for a guy who'd been fighting in Chechnya... "Pretending that you already know the answer when you don't is not actually very helpful." ~Migeru.
