The biggest surprise about this little seen Soviet drama (revived in the late 1980s) isn't that it was banned for two decades, but that it was ever made at all. The film is openly critical of the Revolution, but not from behind the fancy metaphoric camouflage used in other repressed Iron Curtain features. Instead, it offers a direct and sensitive story of a dedicated but pregnant Red Army Commissar who, sometime during the 1930s, finds shelter with a Jewish family and is transformed by their affection. In the end she has to choose between motherhood and the Motherland, but her decision to follow military duty does nothing to diminish her new found sympathy for her surrogate family, and before rejoining her company (slogging through an unglamorous landscape of Ukrainian ice and mud) she entrusts her baby to the care of people (and, by extension, a tradition) she has learned to love. Stylistically, the film is a mix of poetic realism with occasionally self-conscious (but effective) montage flashbacks, plus one haunting flash-forward anticipating the Holocaust.
Review of The Commissar
