Customer Reviews

The Thief

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'd just like to let everyone know who read the comments by the reviewer from Moscow, Russia above that the UK version is uncut and unchanged from the original. In fact I was disgusted to hear that they've cut the ending in the US (DVD?) version. The whole point of the ending shows how Sanyas' life outlook and where he took his life were all being affected by Tolyan. Get the UK version if you can, the US version has been ruined by dropping the original ending.

I saw this movie for the first time when it came out in Russia. It made a very strong impression on me. I am sure you will also find it hard not to feel for the Russian woman, used to being strong, yet so in need of love and protection, and for the boy searching for a father figure in the same horrible world of post-war Russia. Unfortunately, in its American version, the movie had to be cut (probably to make it shorter). Some of the cuts I don't mind as much but cutting off the end of the movie is just over the top! The European version of the movie has another scene where Sanya, now in his forties and an officer taking part in the Afghanistan war ( a terrible part of Russian history, the Soviet version of Vietnam ) and meets Tolyan (who did not die, after all). I will not tell you the rest, in case you happen to find the European version. But I think this ending wraps up the movie much better than the American one.

For the little boy, Tolyan is his role model and his teacher, something that an ideal father should be. One important thing that's missing is father's love, and that void is filled up over time with regret, pity, and anger. Too bad that subtitled release of the movie cuts out the last scene that was in the original. It basically shows Sanya today and how his longing for that love chased him throughout the whole life and who he has become in today's Russia.

This movie is one of my all-time favorites. However, I must say that the last very important scene was deleted in this version of the movie compared to the original Russian version. It is unfortunate since that scene changes the whole moral of the story.

The Thief is a story of a young boy who learns his lessons in manhood from a tough stepfather with a Stalin tatoo, a supposed military man who is really a thief.

The three principal characters, the mother, stepfather, and son, are very convincingly played.

The scenes of life in Russia in the 1950s, from the communual apartments to the bleak landscapes, are magnificent. And the story of this boy's life is compelling.

It's tragic in the classic Russian tradition, but a mesmerizing story and a nice example of quality modern Russian filmmaking.

The allegory in this film of a Stalin/USSR that the child Sanja must defeat went right over my head. So if you're looking for a deep analysis of the directors' subliminal intentions, I can't help you there. But I can tell you that "The Thief" struck me as the most poignant human drama I've seen since "Gallipolli".

Briefly, a soldier's widow with a young son is won over by Tolya, a striking figure in a Red Army uniform which indeed does gaurd a tattoo of Stalin. Once the widow has learned of Tolya's habitual theft, along with his lack of remorse and empathy for others, she is already caught in his romantic spell. And Sanja, at first terrified of this new man in the family, gradually trusts him more and more. Especially for the innocent child, portrayed in awestruck wonder by Misha Philipchuk, this set-up bodes heartbreak.

And the film does not disappoint in that expectation. This is well visualized when an older Sanja, alone and desperate to find Tolya, stares in disbelief as the latter, finally found, doesn't recognize him and ridicules his salutation of "Daddy"...the very nickname the con-artist had insisted on during their days together.

The most innocent and trusting in this film are prey to those whose only desire is to please themselves....and to use the innocents for that purpose. But except for the child, the "innocent" are not blameless in the scenarios that ensue. Sanja's mother,Katje, sees many signs throughout first scenes of Tolya's true character, in his gruffness and cruelty to others, but she stays with him nonetheless, even to the point of jeapordizing her own life.

The device of using a child's eyes as a window to this tragedy works well in this film, emphasizing the difference between the imagined, idolized Tolyan and the real one: not only in his eyes, but in everyone's. I thoroughly enjoyed the film, although I did use a lot of Kleenex.

DVD Extras: trailer for film, subtitles in French, English & Spanish, scene breakdown.

What gets me about this film is that most assume it`s about the Russian peoples relationship with Stalin. Yes, but that is just scratching the surface. It`s too easy an explanation and it`s wrong to assume that this movie is all about that because it does not explain the message of the movie entirely. More importantly, it is a movie of role models and how they affect us throughout our lives. For me, many people are lost today, they do not know who they are or what they are doing with their lives because their identity of who they are was never formed while growing up. One of the worst forms of child abuse, if not the worst, is to strip that identity or the chance to form that identity from a child. When it is not seen to fruition, everything else goes with it. Your soul, your will, is non-existent. When he shoots the thief he is in fact showing that. The fact that the thief was a bad man is irrelevant, all that matters is that he made an impression on the boy, showed him love and respect, and when he finds later on that the thief rejects him, the other end of the spectrum, which is symbolic of abuse growing up, he feels lost and feels he is 'nothing..nothing'. It`s all about love and how we cannot form into full human beings without being shown the path of love whether that path is bad or good. It`s like being told there is a treasure to be found and some are given a map and some maps are stolen from those who have them. It`s why kids are into ghetto rap despite the drug and gang focus. The message is not important, the identity is, so much so that they don`t care if they get killed. The id is more important as love and acceptance are important above all else.

This movie made me cry like no other movie and I'm not a crier. The film is deeply profound, with so many hidden messages to think about. It is truly one of the best films I have ever seen.

Fascinating character study of th early 50's Stalinist Soviet Union. Beyond the plot which others have already adequately commented, this movie takes a peek at the lives of 2 ordinary Russians who get involved with a career petty thief on the run from the Russian Army. The train scenes and communal apartment scenes are indicative of the lifestyles most urban Russians were living at this time. If you are interested in a realistic impression of Soviet life, this movie is for you.

The title character in this film poses as an officer in the Soviet army, shortly after World War II. He settles into rooms in big communal apartments in cities; the residents see his uniform and assume he is a war hero, and the landlords have too much sympathy and respect for him to ask him for his papers. One day, he gets all the residents of the apartment tickets to some show, steals everything he can once they leave, and runs off to another city to repeat the process. With him goes a young woman who hopelessly fell for him one day on a train, some time after giving birth to her son alone in a field somewhere. The son accompanies her; we learn that his father never returned from the war.

That is the very simple story of Pavel Chukhrai's "The Thief." It's also a remarkably powerful story, in many respects. Consider, first, the woman, who absurdly follows the thief across the country, even so far as to try to bribe the officials with her pitiful valuables when the thief is finally caught, even so far as Siberia, where he is eventually sent after that and where she dies of a botched abortion soon after. Consider the opening scene, in the field, where Chukhrai uses close-up shots of her face and hands to show a titanic fortitude, later contrasted with her apparent lack of will. But "lack of will" is emphatically _not_ the right term, since the thief does not really force her to stay with him or scare her into staying. Rather, she _wills herself_ to follow the thief and die in the middle of nowhere. That peculiar strength is shown again in her last lines, when she tells her son why she is in the hospital. Where someone else would have been terrified at similar prospects, she explains with devastating understatement, "Oh, it's nothing, just women's problems."

Consider, second, her son, who grows up both hating and loving the thief, and even calls him "Father" by the end despite long having refused to do so. But he also remembers that he once had a real father, and he sees vague images of him in a soldier's overcoat, blurry, because he does not really remember his face. That image is to him everything the thief is not - straightforward honour - but unlike the thief, it is powerless to do a thing to help him. The minimal narration (by the adult Sanya, we understand) adds another dimension of elegy to the proceedings by making them memories rather than immediate events. And, of course, there's the scene with Sanya's tattoos, where we realize that only with the thief's worldview can he get through life, though only without it can he really save himself. Supposedly, the "real" ending of the film features a grown-up Sanya in a modern war, looking for the thief on a battlefield. I think the film is actually better without it - staying entirely in the past gives it more thematic unity, and the scene with Sanya's tattoos is far more effective at showing what he became, anyway.

Consider, lastly, the thief. It would have been easier than easy for Chukhrai to have made him a uniformly bad person; that would have effortlessly justified Sanya's hatred of him and turned Sanya's mother into a helpless victim. But that is not what he is. He is willing to defend them; he even gets into a fight with a man over Sanya once, when any normal father at the time would have just taken it out on the boy. The thief has no compunctions about also using his fists in his domestic circle, but he is not generally abusive; doubtless many husbands and fathers of that time were far worse. He teaches Sanya a mindset which is destructive but really does help him take life on his own terms. And, when Sanya's mother threatens to leave, instead of just abandoning her, he gives her all the valuables he has on him. That's not to say he loves them, since love is more or less foreign to him, and he uses them to the extent of making the boy help him in his thieving enterprises, but there is more to him than that, and there are things for which Sanya owes him. Some people like to interpret the thief as some kind of symbol of Stalin, especially since the thief has a tattoo of Stalin's face on his body. I don't think this is the case; convicts in that time were known to sometimes joke about Stalin being their father, and to the boy, that's a statement of the thief's strength rather than of his "rightness," since he doesn't seem to believe that the thief's victims are really enemies of the state.

Pavel Chukhrai is the son of Grigoriy Chukhrai, the great Soviet director who made "Ballad of a Soldier," surely one of the highest triumphs of film. Though hindsight given by the past fifteen-odd years' worth of events has made his worldview darker than his father's, he has inherited all of the elder Chukhrai's simplicity, directness and compassion. "The Thief" is in every regard a Chukhrai film; that is, it is a powerful, emotional, and very human film.