![]() Sotnikov sees the light that not only makes things more visible in the room, but also clarifies what the two men stand for spiritually. After the torture, the planks disappear from the window. At the beginning of the torture scene, Sotnikov and Portnov talk in a room with a window boarded by planks. To depict Sotnikov’s transformation, Shepitko changes the mise en scène. The destruction of Sotnikov’s flesh, however, only strengthens Sotnikov’s spirit. With a branding iron shaped like a star he burns the communist ‘red star’ on Sotnikov’s chest. The interrogator hopes that a standard torture method used by Germans against captured partisans will make Sotnikov talk. Sotnikov may be weak physically but he is strong spiritually. When Portnov questions Sotnikov and Rybak, he decides to start with Sotnikov assuming that he will be able to break the physically exhausted man. ![]() Shepitko juxtaposes Rybak’s physical stamina to Sotnikov’s physical weakness. ![]() In order to survive he makes a moral compromise that destroys him as an individual. As a result, the story centres on Rybak rather than Sotnikov. Sotnikov and Portnov struggle for the soul of Rybak. If in Bykov’s book the contrast between Sotnikov and Rybak creates the major narrative tension, in Shepitko’s film three characters play key roles in the plot. Having based her script on Vasil Bykov’s short novel Sotnikov (1970), Shepitko altered the relative significance of characters in her adaptation in order to express more clearly her auteurist understanding of the moral choices that individuals faced during the Second World War. The film’s narrative is a psychological suspense story examining the darker sides of the individual’s psyche and the effect of social terror on an individual’s integrity. Rybak, on the other hand, breaks under torture and agrees to serve the Nazis. Interrogated and tortured by the local collaborator Pavlo Portnov (Solonitsyn), Sotnikov perseveres through all the torments and dies like a hero. The only way to save one’s life is to agree to serve in a Nazi auxiliary police unit. The Germans eventually capture Rybak and Sotnikov, sentencing not only them to death but also everyone who gave them refuge. After the Germans wound Sotnikov, he and his partner find refuge first in the house of an elderly couple and later in the hut of a widow with three children. While the latter is a career serviceman, the former is a school teacher who seems to be unfit for the challenges of the war. The partisans’ commander sends Rybak to get food for the insurgents from neighbouring farms. A German counterinsurgency detachment surrounds the starving partisans and refugees in a frozen forest. The film is set in Nazi-occupied Belarus and follows the story of two partisans (Soviet resistance fighters): Nikolai Rybak (Gostiukhin) and Boris Sotnikov (Plotnikov).
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