Long ago, Boris Giller, an up-and-coming Kazakh producer (American Daughter, [1995]), was inspired by Leo Tolstoy's classic story about a captured Russian POW who falls in love with a girl in the stronghold of his enemies.
In discussions with Sergei Bodrov, the film's director, and the Azeri co-scriptwriter, Arif Aliev, Giller updated the storyline and decided to make an anti-war film. The final script for Le prisonnier du caucase (The Prisoner of the Mountain) was finished six months before the war in Chechenya broke out and the Russian army moved in.
Le prisonnier is about two wounded Russian soldiers who are taken to the mountain village of Abdul-Murat, who hopes to exchange them for his son who has been taken prisoner. When one of the soldiers and Abdul-Murat's son are killed in escape attempts, there is no longer any valid reason for the negotiations to continue.
The surviving soldier, kept in chains and mistreated by his captors, finds solace in the attentions of Abdul-Murat's daughter, who falls in love with him. She knows her father, urged on by the village, is planning to kill him Le prisonnier was shot during the final bloody climax to the Chechen conflict, which adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the film one can almost taste the smell of powder and gunsmoke.
The actual location in the neighbouring Dagestan area was only 25km away from the action and during the shoot was home to some of the Chechen rebels who used to invite the crew to come and film 'the real thing'.
Although the filmmakers deliberately avoided any direct references to the Chechen conflict, the juxtaposition lends the film a certain immediacy. "This story could happen in any war territory," insists Bodrov, "and the first thing people forget about during the war is mercy."
A US resident now, Bodrov ran foul of Russian law-enforcement agencies with his compassionate portrait of teenage delinquency in Ser-Svoboda eta rai (Freedom is Paradise), which lifted the Grand Prix at the Montreal Festival.
Eugene Zykov
Prod Co: Caravan Joint-Stock Co., BG Production
Prod: Boris Giller, Sergei Bodrov
Dir: Sergei Bodrov
Scr: Arif Aliev, Sergei Bodrov, Boris Giller
Ph: Pavel Lebeshev
Prod des: Valery Kostrin
Mus: Leonid Desyatnikov
Ed: Olga Grinshpun, Vera Kruglova, Alain Baril
Cast: Oleg Menshikov, Sergei Bodrov Jr., Suzanna Mekhraileva, Djemal Skharulidze, Alexander Burijev, Valentina Fedotova
Running time: 100mins
International sales: BG Production
