Weasel WatchesWordsWatchesWords

The movie has two parts to it. The first is a war story. After a brief opening battle, we have two Soviet partisans go off on a mission to retrieve some food from a nearby farm. The farm turns out to have been burned by the Nazis, so they continue on and have some additional encounters with a town elder who is collaborating with the Nazis; a few random Germans in a roadside skirmish that leaves one of them wounded; and a woman who is sympathetic enough to not turn them away, but also reluctant to help them because she’s a mother of small children and (quite reasonably, it turns out) doesn’t want to risk her family for the sake of these two strangers.

This part of the movie is well done. It’s not as absolutely brutal as Klimov’s later movie, but it’s still awfully stark: People are starving, the weather is harsh (they’re walking through snow deep enough that you have to do those exaggerated high steps just to be able to move, for instance), everyone is living in fear, and the threat of German reprisal looms over everything. It’s genuinely tense and absorbing.

But then comes the second part of the movie, after the two men are caught by the Germans and brought back to the Nazi camp. They’re interrogated, they’re threatened, they’re seduced with the promise of pardons and power. And here the movie takes a more philosophical/quasi-religious bent.

(Apparently part of the reason it’s only “quasi” religious is that the Soviet censors of the era wouldn’t allow religious themes. So for instance, when Shepitko was trying to cast one of the soldiers so that they’d look Jesus-like, she couldn’t say it; there was also a lot of back-and-forth in approving the script. Despite all that, the religiosity comes through very clearly, and apparently the censors would likely have denied it except that Shepitko gave a private showing to a high-ranking Communist official who had been a partisan in the war, and he found it so moving and true to life that he advocated fiercely for it and it went forward.)

The interrogation scenes are great, with the contrast between the two men immediately apparent. The first man interrogated, the Jesus-like one, refuses to tell the Nazis anything, and is only shaken when they threaten to kill the woman who had reluctantly helped him out, leaving her children motherless. But ultimately, he refuses to cooperate; they torture him and throw him into a prison cell, broken and battered.

Then the second guy comes in, answers the question “Do you want to live?” with “Yes, obviously, of course,” and proceeds to spill information with zero hesitation. The interrogator is pleased with his compliance; he’s offered a job in the German police force, but can’t quite bring himself to take it, so is thrown into the prison cell along with the other guy, whereupon he’s shamed by realizing how tawdry his actions were in comparison.

In short order, the woman is also thrown into the prison cell, as is the town elder collaborator (because the Nazis also suspect him of having helped the two men), and (unrelated to their activities) a little Jewish girl who was caught hiding. They all face death, and over that night, we see them talk about that reality and how they got there, and the different reactions they all have.

This is really the heart of the movie, as that examination of how people face death continues on as they’re brought out of the prison in the morning and begin the titular climb up a hill where gallows await them, through the events that transpire there, and into the aftermath.

The focus on the interiority of the characters, both psychologically and spiritually, gives this part of the film a very different feel from the earlier war movie part of it — among other things, that “interiority” is very literal as well as thematic, as scenes go from being set in vast snowy expanses to a single dark room.