Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky
Stars: Nikolay Burlyaev, Valentin Zubkov, Evgeniy Zharikov
Runtime: 84 minutes

Synopsis: In WW2, twelve-year-old Soviet orphan Ivan Bondarev works for the Soviet army as a scout behind the German lines and strikes a friendship with three sympathetic Soviet officers.

Verdict: If I were to judge the two Tarkovsky films that I've seen so far objectively, I'd rank them amongst the best ones I have ever seen. There's no doubt that the Soviet director knows what he's doing, as proven by the pristine aesthetic present in his work. They're magnificently shot, beautifully scored, and filled with imagery you can't help but gaze at.

Alas, Cinema, like every other form of art, is a subjective medium before anything else. And the main issue I had with both "Mirror" and "Ivan's Childhood" is the fact that the wall separating viewers from the film remained standing throughout their runtimes. I was never able to truly attach myself emotionally to the narrative, and, as an unfortunate result, felt disconnected from the events depicted.

In "Ivan's Childhood", which serves as the filmmaker's quite impressive debut behind the camera, we follow the story of an orphan seeking to get revenge on the German army that murdered his family during World War 2. Tarkovsky uses the story to send a message of hatred towards war and its destructive nature, contrasting it along the way and through the use of flashbacks with the innocence of childhood. The depiction of war through the eyes of children has since been done on multiple occasions, including in last year's "Jojo Rabbit" or in Elem Klimov's masterpiece "Come and See", and both these examples left a bigger impact on me despite maybe not reaching the technical level of Tarkovsky's work but because they didn't deviate from the main goal, something I found "Ivan's Childhood" to be guilty of on many occasions.

In other words, I felt like I was reading a book written in perfect English but that I simply couldn't get into. A quick research about the film showed that Tarkovsky himself was also critical of his debut and considered it to be one of his weakest projects. I wasn't too fond of it, but I'm still hoping that his latter work will leave a bigger mark on me. 

FINAL GRADE: 6/10