#264: Leningrad
Starving for a hero
This review was originally posted to Twitter on June 6, 2020.
Initial release: September 19, 2009
Director: Aleksandr Buravsky
Imagine you were trapped in a city with no way in or out. Leaving the city is death. Food is becoming scarce. It’s a bitter cold winter at below-freezing temperatures. What would you do? How would you react?
In 1941 Nazi Germany breaks the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact and invades the Soviet Union, leaving a swath of destruction in its wake. The defense of Leningrad is fierce, and in lieu of conquering it, the Nazis choose to encircle it, trapping everyone inside. Thus is laid the groundwork for Aleksandr Buravsky’s tense wartime drama, Leningrad.
Kate Davis, a young British journalist, manages to get on a short list of war correspondents sent out of Moscow to document the siege, but through a series of misfortunes, is assumed dead and left behind in the city. Her only friends are a cop, an actress, and a small family. Due to the way bureaucracy in the USSR works, it would be potentially lethal if she were to turn up alive, and so she’s given a false identity, but the KGB soon realizes that not only is she likely alive, but she’s the daughter of a famous White Army general — and thus an enemy.
Despite being a war movie, only the very first part of Leningrad actually shows any real combat; the rest of the film is a tale of a few women and children trapped in the city as extreme starvation sets in. Kate is witness to all manner of horrors, from violence to cannibalism. The story sometimes switches away from her to focus on the KGB stooges trying to track her down, her reporter friends mourning her loss, and, for some reason, a conscientious Luftwaffe pilot who objects to bombing innocent civilians — even though Hitler wants them all dead. The pilot subplot is purely extraneous and midway through the two-hour runtime writes itself out of the film completely. The KGB investigation also doesn’t exactly go anywhere. In fact, if the story had stayed focused entirely on Kate (and Nina the cop) it would’ve been much better.
This is a tough film; while it doesn’t go the lengths that, say, City of Life and Death does, it’s still a difficult watch as we watch these characters suffer and starve, growing weaker and weaker, and Kate’s chances of rescue being repeatedly dashed by misfortune. The siege of Leningrad sometimes tends to get overlooked when discussing the eastern front of World War 2. it lacks the meatgrinder heroism of Stalingrad, or the explosive character of the battle of Kursk… but people suffered, all the same. For all its faults, Leningrad and other films like it fill an important niche in the world war 2 genre; we sometimes forget that wars aren’t just about soldiers, or their commanders, but the people caught in between.
We could do well to keep that in mind.
