December 5 is a memorable date, the day the Soviet offensive began against the Nazi invaders in the battle for Moscow. The release on the screens of the film "Rzhev" directed by Igor Kopylov, telling about the terrible and heroic tragedy of the Russian people, was timed to coincide with this date.

I didn’t go to the patriotic war film with apprehension, but rather without any enthusiasm. It is clear that, most likely, this will be a set of stamps with a heroic political instructor leading a platoon to attack, holding a gun high above his head. I thought I would sit for half an hour, forty minutes ... and go about my business.

And then I felt cold from what was happening on the screen. I began to feel this endless snow and the frozen mud of the trenches, to feel the fingers of the soldiers blackened from the cold and blood as mine.

This film does exploit some stereotypes about wartime, but as they say, those stereotypes that you need. A war film is a genre, and a genre is always built on certain common features.

The whole action of the film fits into one day, when the company under the command of the senior lieutenant performed by Sergey Zharkov must recapture the village of Ovsyannikovo from the enemy.

Around winter, the Germans do not send help, there is no provision, the Wehrmacht soldiers are fighting more professionally, ours have not slept for a day. The company performs the combat mission, but loses half of the personnel, and now the village still needs to be kept under the same, only more difficult conditions.

Politruk is caricatured, but kind: a young semi-educated man in round glasses and with a big nose runs around confusedly, collects leaflets dropped by the Germans with a printed appeal to give up, and the company wall stands behind his fighters and asks for everything from the lieutenant colonel through the laid connection.

The lieutenant colonel is an adamant and cruel creature, for whom it is important to cover the position of cannon fodder. A special officer in a peaked cap with a red band comes to the location of the company through the line of fire to shoot those who dared to pick up leaflets with German propaganda. More than a special officer is not capable of anything - he can only spoil people of their already monstrous life.

And they, these eternal Russians, do not lose heart in the trenches, joke, drink trophy schnapps and scold the Soviet regime for not protecting them.

A firing point is arranged in the ruined temple, which also has a simple but relevant symbolism - flares illuminate the peeling frescoes. And it is in this temple that the fighters discuss the main issue of the war. A young, 17-year-old, ascribed to himself a year intelligent Moscow boy, says that the Germans are cherishing the civilian population, taking everyone who was in the village away from the fighting. A more experienced soldier leads a fellow soldier to the basement, where there are stacks of frozen bodies of those same civilians. Thus, all the wealth of the choice facing the Russian people in the war emerges: to win or die.

There is no victory in the film - right before the company’s credits, having lost everything and losing the battle, he sets off for a new battle. Because war is not a nightmare end, it is a nightmare without end.

Of course, they drink for the victory, as we drink for it, and we 75 years later, but these toasts do not heal wounds.

Films about the war are always driven by inner pathos, which rolls there by itself, by inertia.

A week ago, at the exhibition, I saw a model of the monument to the soldiers who fell in the battles near Rzhev - a soldier in a steel overcoat that flies into the sky with cranes.

It is impossible to look at it without a coma in the throat, just as it is impossible to calmly read any historical evidence of those battles.

The Battle of Rzhev is the common name for battles that lasted more than a year. During those battles, Red Army soldiers did not send Wehrmacht troops inland to Stalingrad, but they lost more than a million people killed, wounded and captured. And maybe a half million.

And there was everyone in such a meat grinder. Everyone you can imagine, and all whose types are collected in the film "Rzhev": an old man who passed the First World War, a thief-recidivist, an intelligent schoolboy, a former teacher of philosophy, the head of the mine, political instructor Yefim Borisovich, a Ukrainian who is ready to surrender.

The memory of Rzhev is the memory of our people. And everything that happens or happened with the people happened to us - not on that scale, fortunately, but grains settled in the soul. That is why the theme of war has such an effect on us - it’s not just a part of the genetic code, it’s the whole gallery of Russian characters who got there according to the law of large numbers. Hit and mostly died. But may not have disappeared forever.

The war in the film “Rzhev” is shown as an inevitable fate - there simply is nothing left, but it’s impossible to somehow worry, because you have to fight and die all the time, and there can be no other things in the war.

The mustachioed old man, whom the polished special officer leads to execution, when the angle changes and the special officer is injured, tells him: "The smile of a baby is like a sacrament." - "Like what"? - does not understand the young punisher.

The fact is that even if the connection of times is broken and people speak different languages, they are still united by a common goal - to survive and let others live.

You can talk for a long time about how the victory was won, why people went to the front and why they fled to the attack. But the film "Rzhev" answers these questions quite simply - because there is a time when nothing else remains. And heroism becomes an integral part of life, because otherwise life is impossible.

And perhaps the only thing that the film “Rzhev” did not have for artistic integrity was Yegor Letov’s song “Order 227” with the words:

Atone with others for blood

Metaphysically relatively expensive.

So squeeze the brave eyes.

...

This choice was given by the Motherland.

The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.