La seconda via

The film belongs to that strand of contemporary WWII cinema that attempts to merge micro-history with an intimate sensibility, prioritising the lived texture of survival over large-scale military spectacle. Its cinematographic strategy is built around a deliberate tension between naturalistic austerity and lyrical interludes, a combination that sets it apart from straightforward combat productions while placing it in dialogue with Attack and Retreat (Italiani brava gente, 1964) and The Opening (Il varco, 2019) - not for narrative similarity, but for their shared commitment to depicting the Eastern Front as an immersive, disorientation-driven environment, rather than a stage for strategic exposition. Like those films, this one observes small groups of men negotiating an indifferent landscape, though it rejects the archival or episodic structures of its predecessors in favour of a more unified, sensorially driven progression.

The film's title, The Second Way (La seconda via), is emblematic: it refers less to a literal route than to an alternative path of perception and survival, a "second way" in which time and space lose their ordinary meaning. Walking hour by hour, day by day, in a snow-bound desert, the physical landscape becomes a mental and emotional terrain, a private space in which soldiers navigate both survival and the weight of memory. This metaphysical dimension resonates with historical accounts from survivors of the Italian campaign in Russia, who described time as suspended and reality blending with dreamlike perception. The film conveys this disorientation through both visual and sonic design, immersing viewers in a state where physical endurance, psychological stress, and the almost hallucinatory whiteness of snow dominate the experience.

The visual grammar relies heavily on static compositions and extended takes, creating an atmosphere of suspended time that mirrors the characters' uncertain passage through an inhospitable landscape. Compared with the more classical on-location photography of Heroic Charge (Carica eroica, 1952), the film's approach emphasises corporeality - the weight of snow, cold seeping into clothing and skin - privileging immediacy and tactile presence over combat spectacle. The environment functions as a silent antagonist, shaping body, mind, and hope.

The film's most distinctive formal element is its use of light in snow-dominated settings. The cinematography emphasises muted blues and greys but in close-ups introduces warmer tones that generate a perceptible contrast between the oppressive anonymity of the environment and the intimate spaces occupied by human presence. This duality - inhospitable environment versus vulnerable humanity - echoes Sunflower (I girasoli, 1970), which also juxtaposes the vast Russian landscape with fleeting moments of emotion and memory. However, unlike that earlier film, here the contrast underscores present precariousness: the threat of climate, uncertainty, and survival. Sound design reinforces this approach: crunching snow, laboured breathing, cutting wind over uniforms, oppressive silence. The score, composed by Elisabetta Garilli and Francesco Menini, appears sparingly, enveloping rather than overwhelming the audience.

The ensemble acting avoids heroic exaltation: instead of acts of bravery, the focus is on human vulnerability and fragmentation. Understated performances, relying on micro-gestures - hesitations, slow movements, glances instead of dialogue - replace conventional drama with a physicality charged with exhaustion and fear. This choice aligns more with the human subtlety of Attack and Retreat (Italiani brava gente, 1964) than with the ideological and symbolic performances in The Man of the Cross (L'uomo dalla croce, 1943), where characters fulfil overt moral roles. By privileging fragility over glorification, the film reinforces its depiction of soldiers as victims of historical circumstances rather than heroes of a noble cause. The attention to young alpine soldiers, often eighteen to twenty years old and taken from poor rural backgrounds, reflects both historical accuracy and the director's humanistic emphasis on empathy, regardless of nationality - whether Italian or Russian.

The historical context of its production, 2023, adds a crucial layer: contemporary Italian and European cinema increasingly approaches WWII not with nationalist rhetoric or heroic idealisation, but with moral ambiguity, survival, and reflection on memory. In that sense, comparison with Spanish production Frozen Silence (Silencio en la nieve, 2011) - one of the few European films on the Blue Division in 1943 in Russia - is illuminating. Like this film, Frozen Silence makes snow, extreme cold, isolation, and disorientation its main narrative tools; both foreground the psychological and physical ordeal. Yet while the Spanish film blends historical context with thriller elements - investigations, betrayals - this film opts for minimalistic realism, closer to atmospheric testimony than genre storytelling. This contrast illustrates two ways of portraying the Eastern Front: one through dramatic suspense, the other through sensory immersion in desolation and endurance.

Technically, editing alternates between the persistent long take and moments of survival tension, though the frequent use of slow motion - intended to underline suffering, confusion, or the lethargy of snow-bound movement - sometimes dilutes the raw immediacy, becoming less an intensification than a stylistic habit. This recalls similar tensions in Attack and Retreat, which oscillates between documentary-like observation and dramatization, though here the balance tips toward atmosphere rather than narrative.

Production design remains restrained: uniforms, weapons, improvisation, wear, and realistic decay. Props serve function rather than fetishise the past. This honesty reinforces the film's logic: survival, not display, connecting to modern approaches that avoid war nostalgia and foreground failure, doubt, and disaster experienced by anonymous individuals.

Together, these elements - cinematography, sound, acting, editing, design - form a coherent cinematic experience: a sensory immersion into white horror, devastation, and vulnerability. The film also carries a moral and emotional aim: to honour the memory of the soldiers, their families, and the lost generation of young men, while fostering reflection on peace and fraternity, translating the historical disaster of the Italian retreat from Nikolajewka into a shared human story. Its merit lies in giving visibility to a little-represented memory, resisting epic temptation, and foregrounding those historically invisible: not heroes, not generals, but exhausted men anonymized by war, struggling to survive. Comparison with Silence in the Snow further reveals that the Russian front experience - already depicted from various national perspectives - can be addressed with a shared sensitivity: cold, war, isolation, fear.