Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957 seen by more than 5.4 million spectators, “When the Storks Pass” is a pure marvel of Soviet cinema. A melodrama with stunning lyricism, to watch on Prime Video.
Moscow, 1941, Veronika and Boris are madly in love. But Germany invades Russia, Boris enlists and goes to the front. Mark, his cousin, avoids enlistment and stays with Veronika, whom he also covets. Without news of her fiancé, in the chaos of the war, the young woman ends up reluctantly marrying Mark. Hoping to find Boris, she takes a job as a nurse in a Moscow hospital and discovers the horror of the conflict.
Placed at the service of a totalitarian and scrupulously supervised state apparatus, Soviet cinema was nevertheless able to move within this straitjacket to produce a number of absolute masterpieces. It must be said that, sometimes armed with almost unlimited resources and crazy inventiveness, certain Russian filmmakers have given the best of themselves for works that have marked the history of cinema.
This is the case of Mikhail Kalatozov; a filmmaker revered (among others) by Scorsese, who made the world rediscover his revolutionary film (in every sense of the word) Soy Cuba, with its completely crazy framing.
A Palme and 5.4 million spectators
Released in 1957, Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival and managing to attract no less than 5.4 million spectators – the 3rd biggest success ever observed at the French box office for a palm-winning film – When the Storks Pass is a a pure marvel of melodrama and sensitivity, carried at arm’s length by the sublime Tatiana Samoilova, nicknamed the “Russian Audrey Hepburn”.
Made during the (brief) period of liberalization which followed the death of Joseph Stalin, When the storks pass represented the first international success of Soviet cinema after World War II.
Turning his back on socialist realism, Kalatozov delivers a work of expressionist images, sometimes almost surreal, packed with camera movements and prodigious sequence shots that are still dissected in film schools.
Very far from being a propagandist, anti-militarist work of stunning lyricism, When the storks pass deserves all the praise. To see or rewatch on Prime Video!