Filmmaker Larisa Shepitko’s drama, a 1977 Golden Bear winner adapted from the 1970 novella Sotnikov by Vasil Bykov, serves up a bleak tale in a forbidding landscape. Set during WWII, the story follows a pair of Russian partisans who are sent to find supplies following a brutal engagement with German soldiers. Rybak (Vladimir Gostyukhin) is the stronger of the two, while Sotnikov (Boris Plotnikov), a math teacher, is weaker—and soon wounded.
Rybak aids and exhorts his companion as they struggle through shin-deep snow, their mission more or less now surrendered to the dictates of simple survival. On their journey, they encounter an old man who has sold out to the Nazis and a mother who briefly hides the men.
Ultimately captured along with others, the two men are interrogated separately by a sadist Russian turncoat working for the Germans, who sums up Sotnikov as “a simple human nonentity full of ordinary shit.” “I won't betray anyone,” Sotnikov states, later citing conscience, while Rybak takes a more nuanced view: “My conscience thinks.”
As the narrative drives toward its inescapable conclusion, characters and scenes are presented with an unmistakable Christian iconography, with fair-haired actor Plotnikov’s face framed and lighted in ways that suggest Christ, an extended sequence presented in which characters trudge up a hill in road-to-Calvary fashion to meet their fate, and someone is labeled a “Judas.”
Shot in stark but luminous black-and-white in a 1:37:1 aspect ratio, The Ascent is a beautifully lensed film that haunts as the camera captures close-ups of faces wracked by pain—physical and spiritual—but also at times beatific and mysterious.
Presented with a new 4K digital restoration, extras include selected-scene commentary featuring film scholar Daniel Bird, a new video introduction by Anton Klimov (son of director Shepitko and filmmaker Elem Klimov), a new interview with actor Lyudmila Polyakova, Shepitko’s 1967 short film “The Homeland of Electricity,” a 1980 short tribute to his late wife by Klimov, a 1999 interview with Shepitko, two 2012 documentaries on Shepitko’s life, work, and relationship with Klimov, and a booklet with an essay by poet Fanny Howe. Recommended.