The Ascent (1977)

The shot that etches the perdurable conflict between man and his environment, worthy of Lean or Kurosawa: two men wearily walk, their figures incontrovertibly linked, their respective postures belying their respective fates while the sequence's psychologically throbbing subtext exhibits an entirely divergent but not the least bit discursive reading. Their trudging in the nightmarish hiemal habitat of Russia displays a subtle, primordial connection to one another against the Brobdingnagian backdrop of the frozen earth of the Byelorussian woods during World War II. Telegraph poles stand, appearing like Russian Orthodox Church crosses in the merciless snowscape. The disorienting close-ups, used with such intense discipline and flawless rationale, poetically drawing the microcosmic national sentiment, sorrowfully illustrating the abhorrence of the devastation visited upon an entire nation. An endless, frightening point-of-view shot in an attic that trenchantly brings one character face-to-face with his fears, almost burking the viewer into submission. An interrogator's diabolic eyes, anagogic apertures into a nearly remorseless truculence—adjusted into something ambiguously poignant much later, magnetically, mesmerically frightening in their vaguely languishing repugnance.

The Ascent is a stark black-and-white transcendental chef-d'oeuvre, an unmistakably refulgent work of art by celebrated Soviet filmmaker Larissa Sheptiko. The film feels related to Dostoevsky's “Prince Myshkin” and the films of Andrei Tarkovsky. Its spellbinding and palpable Gotterdammerung reaches a numinous culmination as an allegorical telling of the passion and crucifixion of Christ. Based on the novel “Sotnikov,” the name of the protagonist, by Vasili Bykov, the screenplay was co-written by Yuri Klepikov and Sheptiko. That protagonist, Sotnikov, is played by Boris Plotnikov, and the man walking in the unforgiving cold with him is Rybak, played by Vladimir Gostyukhin. They are searching for a village, low on ammunition, and find themselves in the home of a headman. Rybak berates him for betraying the cause of the motherland, aligning with the occupational forces of the Germans. Soon, Sotnikov and Rybak find themselves perilously tracked by a German patrol. Sotnikov is shot in the leg. Fearing that he may be captured, he readies himself to commit suicide, aiming his rifle at his own head, saying aloud that his foes will not take him alive. Eventually, however, they do.

Sotnikov was a mathematics teacher as a civilian; Rybak, a peasant. Plotnikov's performance is achingly intense, volcanically fierce without the least bit of hamminess or falsity. The frenetic gleam in his eyes, referred to by the man who eventually interrogates him (Anatoli Solonitsyn, Tarkovsky's on-screen alter ego) as truly fanatic, speaks volumes. Plotnikov's turn is laden with stunning impetus, leonine and messianic, his character's words sparsely communicating the earnestness that propels his every course of action. Gostyukhin's beautifully textured fear of leaving this world is endowed with the unnerving insularity and terror he imbues in Rybak. Solonitsyn's projection of iniquitous arrogance lacerates the hopes of the viewer, crushingly devastating the psyches of the two partisans. Each major character is performed by an actor whose every gesture, nuance and movement bolsters the multi-layered aggregate veins of The Ascent, their physiognomies implacably articulating the depths thereof.

Sociopolitically, Sheptiko's opus can be partly seen as a blunt reinforcement of the sanctity, not so much of the Soviet regime, but of the Red Army and the countless partisans who fought and perished in the Great Patriotic War. Sotnikov declares himself a special agent for the Red Army, an avowed Bolshevik who joined the party in 1935. Defiantly, he tells the menacing interrogator that he only wished he could have killed more of the defilers of his motherland. Russian nationalists can reflexively point to scenes that reveal Russian peasants visibly repulsed by the turncoat traitors who betrayed the partisans to save themselves.

The cinematography by Vladimir Chukhnov and Pavel Lebeshev is breathtakingly exemplary, aiding Sheptiko with an impeccable black-and-white lighting that casts the events of the grueling story in a hauntingly bleak prism. Sheptiko's compositions are nothing short of awe-inspiring; her camera is always indefective, placed with shattering perfection. Characters are continuously arranged in centrifugally and diametrically arresting configurations, pictorially creating live action paintings that linger with the viewer long after the picture has concluded. Plentiful shots are composed in deliberate ways that echo the paintings of Christ's Passion. Orchestrating a cinematic concerto, Sheptiko's virtuoso command of every aspect of her filmic creation sublimely conveys the insurmountable demiurgic artistry that inescapably draws the eyes of the partaker.

The intimate stages that occupy much of the film's story play not as a simple contrast to the exterior vastness in which the two hunted partisans found themselves, but a statement of soulful corrosiveness, the philosophical battleground between the proud Sotnikov and the practical Rybak. The tight confines of their rooms, including the aforementioned attic, and others, underline the dismal options to be had. Their back-and-forth struggle displays a lyrical rhythm unto itself, with Rybak resorting to blaming Sotnikov for their probably shared fate due to his being wounded.

Steeped in deeply moving Christian symbolism, Sheptiko allows Sotnikov's face to become a veritable portal through which the viewer finds solace and finally inspiration. That face, resembling the prevalently, artistically accepted look of Jesus Christ, allows Plotnikov's Sotnikov to most entirely absorb the fleshly and spiritualist and as the film gracefully reaches its climax, those features are augmented in importance and clarity. Meanwhile, the bleary, weathered face of Gostyukhin's Rybak is glacially transformed into a terrified, ashamed specter of Judas Iscariot, selling out his friend to save his hide. The gulf between Sotnikov and Rybak when confronted by the specter of death, personified by Solonitsyn's horrifying interrogator, is especially tragic in its moral ramifications. Sotnikov's statement to his less nobly-minded friend—“What matters is to stay true to yourself”—finds a more penetrating dimension in this film than any other in which that same line has been uttered. Sotnikov becomes a holistic martyr figure, soaking up the sins of his friends and countrymen like a sponge, and consequently suffering the wrath of the persecutors.

During the film's harrowing apogee, the cinematic lashing Sheptiko administers leaves scar tissue, leveling one's comparatively meager expectations. The titular ascent is of punitive gravity, sensationally delving into the mystical chords of the subconscious. The setting and mise-en-scene indelibly point to Golgotha as the divine afflatus. Playing out like a meditative stations of the cross, the torrid impression of the entirely riveting narrative apex, leaves nothing less than singe marks while allowing the recipient to fully excogitate the corollaries derived from the meticulous enactment of selfless sacrifice. (That sacrifice is represented with a dead lamb earlier in the film. Sacrifice is, on three separate occasions, given considerable treatment as a mortally destructive route, vis-a-vis Rybak, whose redoubtable glances at his potentially ruinous fate act as a cumulative constraining limitation that holds him in ignominious shame, guilt and self-loathing.)

Occasionally, a film is watched and studied, consumed and exhaustively critiqued, that is so wracking, so incontestably jolting, it leaves one pressed against their seat, unable to move, struggling to breathe and vainly trying to hold back tears. This is such a towering piece of cinema, the true weight of which surpasses the best efforts of those groping for an adequate description. The genuinely ineffable potency of this achievement dwarfs the conative words with which one can explain its grim sublimeness.

The Ascent is a film of unquestionable power, weaved with a prodigiousness that is finally nothing less than miraculous. And miraculous in many ways. Never condescending or didactic, the film's ravishingly dualistic portrayal of both the ontic and the otherworldly is overwhelmingly puissant, resulting in nothing less than a searing motion picture experience.