Issue 87 (2025) |
Ainur Askarov: Clemency (Pomilovanie, Bashkortostan, 2023) reviewed by Frederick C. Corney © 2025 |
This film by the young Bashkir director Ainur Askarov is based on a work of the same name by the celebrated Soviet Bashkir laureate, Mustai Karim. Karim served in the Red Army and was severely wounded in 1942, after which he wrote for front-line newspapers. He completed Clemency in Bashkir in 1985, and it appeared in Russian two years later. Askarov’s earlier interest in Karim’s works, The Taganok Squad (Otriad Taganok, 2021), and his producers’ interest, Little Sister (Sestrenka, 2019), suggest a renewed interest in this Bashkir author.
The film opens in summer 1942 on the outskirts of Stalingrad, on the eve of the fateful battle. A 20-year-old tank-driver, Sargeant Liubomir Zukh (Aleksandr Novikov), stands before a board of three NKVD officers. Just before being sent to the front, he had briefly abandoned his unit—taking his tank with him—to bid farewell to a young local girl, with whom he had fallen madly and deeply in love. A random complaint from a farmer, whose barn he had inadvertently razed and whose milk goat he had killed with his tank on the way back to his unit, had exposed the tank-driver’s unsanctioned absence from his unit. Although absent for just five hours, Zukh now finds himself brought up on charges of desertion. Pursuant to Article 193 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, the penalty is a firing squad.
This dark and somber opening vignette presages Zukh’s ultimate fate, conveying to the viewer that this film is about the journey from Zukh’s sentencing to his execution. In the meantime, the film cuts to a bright and lively railway station platform in a different town several months earlier, where another young soldier, Lieutenant Iantimer Bainazarov (Nikolai Galliamov), arrives to join his unit. While the specter of Stalingrad lurks in the background of this film, this is, mercifully, no heroicized paean to a battle or its soldiers of the kind so prominent in the war film genre. Indeed, barely two minutes at the end of the film are devoted to an unidentified battle in 1945, and only one German soldier appears in the entire film. In this small army post, Zukh finds himself thrown together with Bainazarov and another newly arrived soldier, Lenya Lastochkin (Evgenii Mikheev). These three musketeers quickly become firm friends, and they navigate their uncertain journeys together.
This film, then, is not about the chaos of the battle-front but the chaos of the rear, broadly defined. Evidence abounds of the logistical chaos of the army rear: a threadbare army base with a diffident—or burned-out—Commander with no orders to relay to his charges and no idea when he might get them from HQ; and no official barracks or functioning canteen for his soldiers. The three soldiers’ patriotism is off-hand and rote, the naive Zukh’s mantra of “I want to kill my fascist” countered with Lastochkin’s “the war will end without you, you know.” Their toast to “Victory” is cursory at best. Left to their own devices, and advised in passing by the Commander to go form their own brigade, their response to their situation is ad hoc. They forage for food, at one point eating rowanberries from trees, at another point trading sex for food from the local head cook. As Lastochkin puts it, they have no money, and so they will pay “with love, with hot fiery love with all our heart.” Finally assigned to a unit, the three find themselves in a small field camp near the village of Podlipki.
This is the heart of the film. This brief respite between non-war and war allows for the chaos of human relations to proceed as if times were normal. Zukh, Bainazarov, and Lastochkin train with their unit, maintain their equipment, dance and sing, and ogle and flirt with the local women. The atmosphere at the encampment is both careless and without cares. Interestingly, the objects of their desires all have the upper hand. Commander Khomichuk (Aleksandr Bukharov) has not seen his wife, an actress, in a long time, but when they meet up, she rejects him. Bainazarov’s infatuation with a local Bashkir medic turns out to be a complete misreading of the situation on his part. The film is interested only in Zukh’s relationship with the young girl, Mariia Tereza (Dzhamilia Mudarisova in her debut role), a girl of Spanish descent tossed up here by fate. Zukh is a woefully naïve and inexperienced Adam to Mariia Tereza’s Eve. Indeed, she sparks their relationship by rolling an apple towards him. She sets the terms of their relationship from their first kiss to their “marriage” and its consummation.
After a showing of the film, the writer Aleksei Varlamov noted that “life is always more important than the dead letter of laws and regulations” (cited in Al’perina 2023) The film itself, however, suggests otherwise. As the sad side-glances from the older soldiers reveal, this love story is at best a brief respite from reality and at worst a self-delusion, not just for the individuals involved, but for the entire unit, and a dangerous self-delusion in time of war. Throughout, there are two constants: the inevitable “arrival” of the front, and the unstoppability of the “flywheel” (makhovik) that keeps the military bureaucracy in motion. Even before the former will rudely restore “reality,” the latter has already done its part. Zukh’s sentence cannot be stopped, even though nobody thinks it is deserved or even commensurate for the infraction. Neither the camp commander who made the report that set the makhovik in motion, nor the judicial investigator who “proved” the case and now tries to stop it, agree with it. The farmer who reported Zukh pleads with the commander to stop it and is told he does not have the power, to which he replies: “Then what is in your power, Commander?” In a plea for mercy for his friend, Bainazarov confesses his own guilt for not stopping him from leaving the camp. Mariia Tereza takes off in search of the unit to plead for his life. Zukh himself cannot believe that the Red Army would execute a good soldier when there are still so many fascists to be killed. Reasonable minds can make reasoned arguments against the sentence. But this is the time and place for neither.
His comrades have dug the grave. The deadline will not be extended again. The motorcycle dispatcher bringing his pardon from HQ will not be in time. The Commander will give the command. The executioners will execute. Zukh will die puzzled by his death. Khomichuk’s speech to the assembled soldiers and the firing squad is uncompromising on this deserved punishment for “treason to the Motherland.” “We are executing not only a former sargeant,” he tells them, “we are executing willfulness and indiscipline; war will not write off our mistakes or sins…. And in order to win, you must be merciless to the enemy. And in order to be merciless to the enemy, you must be merciless to yourself.” This is the time and place that matters, he implies, not any other. The entire film builds towards this expected end, but the dramatic payoff is blunted by the addition of a series of short codas, in which the ultimate fate of Mariia Tereza, Khomichuk, and Bainazarov are revealed. This directorial desire to tie up loose ends, or a sop, perhaps, to audience expectations, is a missed opportunity.
While Zukh experiences the same fate in both Askarov’s film and Karim’s novel, the poet provides Khomichuk with a more lyrical message for the assembled soldiers: “And who was he, Liubomir Zukh?…. It is necessary to know why he died. Heroically? No. Carrying out his military duty? No. Sentenced for desertion? Khomichuk is not able to write that. He thinks about it and finally writes: ‘L. D. Zukh. A victim of the war.' And isn’t that the truth? If not for the war, surely this would not have happened with Liubomir, surely he wouldn’t have brought us such grief? He would have lived with Mariia Tereza or with someone else, just Mariia, and he would have built their life for glory.” (Karim 1987, 182). The two speeches are products of different times and cultural moments. Place and time are always key.
Frederick C. Corney
William & Mary
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Works Cited
Al’perina, Susanna. 2023. “Na Moskovskom kinofestivale pokazali fil’m po povesti Mustaia Karima ‘Pomilovanie’,” Rossiiskaia gazeta, 24 April.
Karim, Mustai. 1987. Pomilovanie. Povest’. Moscow: Sovremennik.
Clemency, Bashkortostan, 2023
Color, 100 minutes
Director: Ainur Askarov
Cast: Aleksandr Novikov; Nikolai Galliamov; Evgenii Mikheev; Dzhamilia Mudarisova; Gela Meskhi; Aleksandr Bukharov
Screenwriter: Aidar Akmanov from a tale by Mustai Karim
Camera: Andrei Makarov
Editor: Igor’ Medvedev
Musical Producer: Denis Dubovik
Producers: Timerbulat Karimov; Mikhail Kurbatov; Dmitrii Fiks
Casting: Tat’iana Luchinina
Production: Motor Film Studio
Ainur Askarov: Clemency (Pomilovanie, Bashkortostan, 2023) reviewed by Frederick C. Corney © 2025 |