Customer Reviews

Commissar [VHS]

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Based on the story "In The Town Of Berdichev" by the great Ukrainian Jewish writer Vasily Grossman (author of "Life And Fate"), this film was originally shot in 1967. It was "shelved" for over 20 years by being denied funds for its completion, finally coming to light in the Glasnost era.

It concerns a woman commissar (military political officer) named Vavilova in a Red Army cavalry unit during the Russian Civil War of 1918-20. She finds herself pregnant to a fellow officer who has recently been killed, and is billeted with a poor Jewish tinker, Magazannik, his wife and six kids. From her initial hostility to her new surroundings, she eventually becomes involved in the life of the family, before giving birth to her child - and then disappearing to join the first Red Army unit that passes her way.

It's not difficult to understand why the Soviet authorities didn't want this film to be seen. Besides the fact that Grossman wrote the original story (he died in 1964 after falling from favour when he submitted "Life And Fate" for publication in 1960), the ambivalence between her roles as agent of the Revolution and mother of her child would have been more than the Soviet censors could have tolerated.

This is one of the most moving war films that I have ever seen.

Komissar is a movie very dear to me. I watched this for the first time in my life in November 1989, in Romania. I was quite young, Ceaucescu had his last Communist Party Congress - he was to fall with a (literal) bang soon, in December 1989. I still remember how shocked I was that the Communist censors allowed this amazing anti-Communist movie into the cinemas... it must have been ignorance rather than courage.

This 1967 movie was banned during its own time, the director Askoldov never made a movie again, his very life was in danger for a while. Even as late as 1987, in full-blown perestroika, he had troubles to get his movie out of the censors' hands. Finally he could do it, and the movie was a triumph with international critics and audiences.

If you believe this is an obsolete, half-boring movie, the main quality of which would be that it was courageous for its own time, think again. This is a poetic masterpiece which endures fantastically well the test of time. If you only like American movies, avoid this. If you're reasonably cultivated movies-wise, if you like Dreyer, Fellini, Carne, Kadar, and the like, by all means, do not allow yourselves to die before watching this movie. Askoldov, the director of one and only serious movie, is on the same level with the ones named above. Apologies for the apparently shrill sale pitch, but yes, this is a one-of-a-kind masterwork. It is deep, tragic, subtle, it deals with the ethics and chaos of war, without the gore nor the guts. I would place this movie on the same pedestal as I place Kadar's (also unique) The Shop on Main Street.

A few words about this particular edition, which made me throw the old, worn-out VHS tape to the garbage: it is extraordinary as well. Everything is ideal. (OK, the English translation could have been better, perhaps.) The transfer, both in its video and audio aspects (terrific soundtrack from a young Schnittke!!) made me experience this, on a plasma TV, like I was back in the cinema.

What was even more unexpectedly generous and good was the second DVD, containing special features. I have never seen, not even in my many beloved Criterion DVDs, such a generous, relevant, well-made bunch of interviews - with priceless historical context, contemporary documentation and the like. Watching the special features was almost as riveting as re-watching the movie itself.

Do not buy this in any other edition. This is cinema at its true best, offered in an ideal packaging.

As beautiful as an Eisenstein movie, "Commissar" focuses on the contrast between a cold brutal woman soldier from the Red Army and a poor tender intense Jewish family. A deep insight into the 1920s Civil War and life in the Pale of settlement, children, motherhood. A unique masterpiece!

A work of she-commissar (Bolshevik "chaplain") was addressed to own folks while contextual nuances of October Revolution-timing affairs between poor Jewish family and a revolutionary servicewoman giving a birth to her child and ushered back to the arms with Holocaust visions, had to some extent lost in translation.

A movie-maker was ostracized at the time and had his career ruined for pro-Jewish motives of a work questioning the very basics of Bolshevik revolution, which what was unthinkable before the USSR disintegrating.

Well, could such an intellectual genocide be experienced in a former communist block only?

The story and characters are a bit thin; a female leader in the Russian
Revolutionary army in 1922 is disgraced when she is found to be
pregnant, and goes to live with a Jewish family, loses her hard shell
and becomes a mother.

But the black and white images are truly striking and impressive,
especially the fantasy sequences. They give the story a much deeper
power and resonance than it would otherwise have.

Especially impressive as a first film. this was suppressed by the
Moscow authorities for 20 years for it's sympathetic view of Jews and
their oppression in Russia, and the implication that the USSR was
complicit in knowing about, and not trying to stop the concentration
camps of WW 2.

This is an amazing movie, based on the 1917 Russian Revolution, that was done back in the old USSR days (mid-1960's). The cinematography is excellent (really!), the sound track perfect, and the acting was first rate... Anyone who thinks Soviet era cinema was schlocky or crummy has NEVER seen this movie... it will grab you and hold you to its end.

Not a great pic by today's standards but VERY INTERESTING in its' depiction of life in the Soviet Union 10 years or so after the Revolution. The acting is very 'hammy' by today's standards ----- but no more so than what was regarded as good if not great acting by the Hollywood idols of the same era as when this film was made.
In short it is a valuable addition to the media library of anyone interested in life in the Soviet Union and how it compares with our perception of it.
Film critics enthused over "stunning image after stunning image" and this is a bit over the top. But nevertheless it is a very interesting and worthwhile film if one keeps in mind that film-makers in the Soviet Union were kept on a very short leash, particularly when making film versions of the works of such authors as Vassily Grossman (Life and Fate) who wrote this film as "In Berdichev Town"

Another interesting and engaging film fro the Soviet era. It is very realistic and does not shy away from deep, and politically "deviant" explorations of the title character, the Commissar. A must see for any student of the USSR.

The Bottom Line:

Though a similar storyline was handled to somewhat better effect in Ballad of a Soldier, Commisar is still a reasonably interesting story of a soldier who leaves the chaos of war to the idyll of the home front; notable for its references to the Holocaust, Commisar should interest Russian film aficionados.