Dvadstat dnei bez voiny
USSR,
1976, 100 min
Shown in 1987
CREDITS
- dir
-
Alexei Gherman
- scr
-
Konstantin Simonov
- cam
-
Valery Fedosov
- cast
-
Yuri Nikouline, Ludmilla Gurchenko, Alexei Petrenko
- source
-
Goskino
- premiere
-
U.S. Premiere
-
COMMENTS
Alexei Gherman in person.
OTHER
Lopatine, a noted writer and war correspondent, gets a brief furlough after the Battle of Stalingrad. During his week-long train journey home, he encounters a cuckolded soldier, a woman in tears; he watches, listens, dreams. Arriving in Tashkent, he visits his ex-wife and witnesses the shooting of a film based on his work: Its bombastic posturing seems to travesty the sense he’s tried to convey of war as muddy, cold, filled with fear. He meets the tearful woman he’s glimpsed on the train. They share a brief idyll, all the more moving for its restraint. Profoundly antiwar, though it doesn’t depict a single battle, Gherman’s second film was shelved for nearly a decade. Stunningly photographed, like Trial on the Road, in black-and-white ’Scope, 20 Days is an even more marked break with Soviet cinema’s traditionally edifying stories and Manichean themes. Yuri Nikouline, a famed circus clown, and Ludmilla Gurchenko give extraordinary performances as the anguished, uncertain lovers.
—Peter Scarlet
FACTOID #68
Stanley Mosk, who later became a California state Supreme Court Justice, served as the general chairman at the 1967 Festival.
