Trial on the Road

I don't recall hearing any music in the film, except for people playing IN the film, not for the film. This is good, cause music distracts. War takes ordinary people to extraordinary situations where the real soul can be discovered. It felt natural for me to walk into the frame and participate in the dilemmas of everyone in the film. And I was not sure what I would have done in similar situations. I, simply, lack the capacity to fully absorb the depths of the soul searching in the film. It has not the brutality of Klimov, nor the conscience drama of Shepitko, but it has the same depth of penetration into the human soul at those defining moments. Just to set my scale, 10 goes to Andrei Rublev. It is NOT on a par with Klimov's "Come and see", nor with Shepitko's "Ascent".

To encounter this film is to step into one of the most unsettling absences of Soviet war cinema: a work completed in 1971, silenced for fifteen years, and released only when the ideological structures that had censored it were beginning to crumble. Its belated appearance in 1986, at the dawn of perestroika, makes it appear prophetic. Yet its power resides not in foresight but in moral candor-the quiet, deliberate refusal to sanctify the Second World War as myth. The difficulty of translating its title-alternately rendered as Trial on the Road or Checkpoint-feels symbolic: the film itself resists any single interpretive checkpoint, any stable moral translation.

Shot in austere black and white, the film rejects both the muscular heroics of Soviet wartime cinema and the sentimental humanism that had softened the genre in the 1950s and 1960s. Its cinematography, with its granular textures and pallid tonalities, seems designed to erase glamour from the image. Snow, mud, and fog do not function as atmosphere but as moral climate; they blur the boundaries between purity and contamination. The camera's stillness creates a sense of surveillance rather than sympathy-each frame a moral interrogation, each gesture an answer deferred. Unlike Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a Soldier, 1959), which sculpted its lyricism out of motion and youth, this film anchors itself in stillness and middle age. War here is not a proving ground for virtue but a prolonged suspension of certainty.

The acting is pitched at the edge of exhaustion. The protagonist-an ex-prisoner of war who defected to the Germans before seeking redemption among Soviet partisans-is portrayed not as an emblem of treason or rehabilitation but as an opaque human presence, a body negotiating distrust. His silence, his hesitant physicality, create a performance of moral latency. Around him, the partisans' faces-creased, unshaven, impassive-form a collective portrait of skepticism. These are not cinematic soldiers but men burdened by a reality they can neither exalt nor escape. The director's decision to keep emotion suppressed until the rare moment of rupture gives those few releases an almost physical violence.

The sound design reinforces this economy. There is virtually no non-diegetic music; what we hear are the internal sounds of that world-snow crunching underfoot, distant artillery, the crackle of fire, the muttered suspicion of men in hiding. The absence of a musical score denies the viewer the moral cues that Soviet cinema so often relied upon. It is, in this sense, a radical act of realism: emotion must be earned from the situation itself, not imposed upon it.

If the film feels closer to certain Western depictions of the Second World War-say, the ambivalence and moral fatigue that Saving Private Ryan would later articulate-it is because it recognizes that courage and complicity coexist within the same gesture. Yet even this comparison is imperfect: where Spielberg's soldiers are redeemed through shared sacrifice, Aleksey German's figures seem incapable of redemption at all. The protagonist's attempt to prove his loyalty is filmed less as penance than as a metaphysical impossibility.

A more precise comparison might be with Ascent (Voskhozhdenie, 1977), another Soviet film in which war becomes a test of the soul rather than the body. But while Ascent transfigures its ordeal into spiritual transcendence, this earlier work-conceived fifteen years before its release-remains earthbound. Its metaphors of snow and silence suggest not divinity but paralysis. The film never rises; it endures. The difference between the two marks the evolution of Soviet moral consciousness: Ascent was tolerated because it still sanctified sacrifice, whereas Proverka na dorogakh was buried because it showed loyalty as fragile, uncertain, and often meaningless in the machinery of war.

Understanding its censorship is essential to understanding its aesthetics. In 1971, Soviet ideology demanded that all representations of the Great Patriotic War reinforce collective heroism. To depict a Russian soldier who had once collaborated with the enemy was to acknowledge a fracture in the myth of unity. The film's realism-its recognition that civilians under occupation might resent the partisans as much as the Germans, its refusal to depict partisans as moral certainties-was intolerable precisely because it was true. When it finally emerged in 1986, the official narrative had decayed enough to allow that truth to surface, though even then it carried the residue of its own compromise: a faint, tacked-on ending that gestures toward patriotic closure, as though hoping to appease the ghosts of censors long gone.

Technically, it is one of the most controlled Soviet war films ever made. The framing is rigorous to the point of asceticism; the camera seems to fear intrusion. The composition of bodies within the frame-often static, seen through mist or window panes-conveys moral distance. At times this austerity risks monotony, and one might wish for greater variation in tempo. But the consistency of tone, the refusal of release, is integral to the film's integrity. It was never designed to move; it was designed to weigh.

Its delayed release means that it belongs to two historical moments simultaneously. As a 1971 production, it speaks from within the moral exhaustion of late socialism, when the war's mythology had become a ritualized pageant. As a 1986 release, it participated in the emerging project of historical reckoning. This dual temporality gives it a strange texture: it looks backward to an era of absolute faith and forward to an age of skepticism. Watching it now, one feels the chill of both.

Few films about the Second World War-Eastern or Western-convey so precisely the moral entropy of life under occupation. It transforms the familiar terrain of partisan warfare into an existential inquiry. Its landscapes are not battlefields but thresholds, places where conviction freezes and thaws with the weather. And in that bleak, unyielding space, Aleksey German created a film that could only have been misunderstood in its own time-a film that turns the heroic war narrative inside out and discovers, in the void, the uneasy dignity of doubt.

Good, solid wartime adventure films have (understandably) become anachronisms, but this Russian export, inexplicably shelved for over a decade after its completion, proves to be a rare exception. The film is a tense, realistic drama of the struggles against treachery (both internal and external) in a homeland held captive by enemy soldiers, and is as taut and exciting as it is intelligent and thoughtful. A former traitor, after collaborating with the Nazis to save his own life, surrenders to a partisan brigade operating deep within Fascist-held territory. Scorned and distrusted by his comrades, he must prove his loyalty in a daring daytime hijacking of a German munitions train. The film combines complex characters with exciting action sequences to create a striking and memorable drama, building to an edge-of-seat climax and photographed with crystal-clear, wide-screen black and white imagery.

Despite its age, this is a very good film. The story of the Russian and Ukrainian soldiers who defected to the German side to fight with General Vlasov against the hated Bolsheviks has not been shown in many films, so this one is a welcome addition.

Some reviewers have puzzled over the question why the film's distribution was held up for 14 years, made in 1971 and released only in 1985. The answer seems fairly obvious: this is a political film, which is not shy about showing NKVD officers in a less-than-flattering light. Furthermore, while patriotic, it stresses the human and personal aspects of life and it is almost Christian in its theme of crime and redemption. 1971 USSR under Brezhnev what still not ready for those ideas, hence the hold-up.

While the acting is fairly wooden by modern western standards, the dialogue rings true but the real appeal lies in the breathtaking cinematography, showing the wintry expanses of Russia in an almost palpable way, so much so that the viewer can almost feel the cold wind blowing.

For WW2-films buffs and for students of Soviet cinema this film is a must, but others interested in stories about humanity, redemption and moral choices will benefit from viewing it as well.

During the Second World War a Russian soldier, previously forced into collaboration with the Germans, escapes and joins the partisans but first has to prove his reliability. One of a number of films to re-emerge in the mid 80s, having been suppressed for being too challenging. The particular sin of this war film was to suggest that Stalin's policy of automatically shooting POWs on recovery was callous and ignored questions of conscience, treating all soldiers as potential traitors. It also shattered the idea, long upheld, of a united Soviet Union fighting the German devil: here the peasantry would prefer to be left alone by both sides since association with one brings reprisals from the other.