User Reviews

After the Russian Civil War, the Russian worker Andrei Sokolov (Sergei Bondarchuk) marries his beloved Irina (Zinaida Kirienko) and seventeen years later, the couple has a son and two daughters. The family man Andrei is summoned by the Red Army as truck driver in the World War II and he promises to Irina that he will return to his family. Andrei drives through a road that is bombed and he is captured by the Germans and suffers in the prisoner camps. He finds strength to resist the maltreatment of the German soldiers thinking in Irina and his children.

Andrei succeeds to escape from the Germans and finds that Irina and their daughters were killed during the bombing of their house and his son Anatoly is a Captain of the Russian Army. Near to the end of the war, Anatoly dies and Andrei does not see any motive to live. Until the day that she sees the starving orphan Vanja begging on the streets of Uryupinsk.

"Sudba Cheloveka" is a magnificent Russian anti-war film with the nightmarish saga of a survivor of World War II. The narrative is perfect, with top-notch screenplay, direction, performances, cinematography and scenarios. The film gives the sensation of documentary and I am not sure whether the director Sergei Bondarchuk used in his debut inserted footages to give more realism to the movie.

The sequence when Andrei meets the orphan boy is touching and never corny and closes this little masterpiece with golden key. My vote is nine.

Title (Brazil):"O Destino de um Homem" ("The Destiny of a Man")

This movie is very special in many ways. It is a good movie in cinematic terms because it is aesthetically very impressive and has a good plot structure. On the other hand, this film touches subjects that were taboo in the Soviet Union of the time, and bravely shows parts of the history of the war that had not been part of public discourse at the time. It is also unusual because many Soviet films about WWII ended with an upbeat note, unlike this one.

"Fate of a Man", as the title of the film translates, is a movie about a Soviet man (Sokolov) who experiences many of the horrors of the war against the Soviet Union. The movie tells his story in a flashback, showing how he is very broken after the war and what led to this. He had lost his family in the war, and had fought in it, he witnessed how his Jewish comrades were singled out and killed, and then he was taken to Germany to do forced labor. There, he suffered all sorts of abuse and barely survived. After the war ends, he goes back home, distressed and unable to find comfort for his emotional and physical pain. The film is very subtle in its depiction of the horrors of war, even though it does not white-wash what happened. As it was the first Soviet film to touch the subject of slave labor during the war, and of the murder of the Soviet Jews, it does this carefully, emphasizing the humanity of the victims of these cruel crimes without focusing on the gore. Together with "The Cranes are Flying" and "Ivan's Childhood" this is one of the first Soviet films about WWII that do not have a happy "we won"-type of ending. These three films were a form of dealing with the suppressed pain of Soviet citizens, after having lost one quarter of their population (27mio.) through the brutal attack by the Nazis.

This movie is very impressive and very touching as well. I highly recommend it.

Destiny of a Man is an extremely genuine exploration of a Russian soldier's experience during the "Great Patriotic War," that strips him of everything he loves. Director Sergei Bondarchuk portrays a character whose struggles, sadness, and heroism feel astonishingly real. His acting brings audiences through a series of scenarios that demonstrate the pain and suffering caused by the conflict at home and on the front.

The film is a continuation of the departure in the late 1950s from the Stalin Era's socialist realism into the postwar period of actual realism, in which characters act based on believable motives whether or not they follow the party line. Sokolov survives innumerable atrocities, bravely facing his Nazi tormentors, not for Mother Russia, but for the love of his family. In fact, the state plays very little role in the film at all, and it is very much the story of its protagonist, a story that is emotionally relevant in a very universal way.

The film is honest and humble, but proceeds with a powerful style that underscores its raw humanity. It is marked by a motif of elevation, with Sokolov's emotions manifested in the highs and lows of shots and locations throughout his ordeal. He meets his wife while building a house, standing high above the ground. In scenes of suffering, including one in which he must lie on the ground in a Nazi detention camp, he is low to the ground, looking up at the imagined members of the family he so wishes to see. Likewise he ascends through his village to be reunited with his family, he reaches the depths of despair as he descends into the crater where his house stood.

In the end, the message is a positive one. Much like Veronika in the earlier film The Cranes are Flying, Sokolov begins to rebuild his life around an adopted son who has also lost everything in the war. Troubles continue to plague the man and his country, but he is not alone, a simple message that matches the humanity woven throughout the film.

I've seen a few Russian war films recently and noticed that they feel more like Hollywood war films . Both THE STAR and 9TH COMPANY suffer from this . COME AND SEE didn't . It was a brutal , unforgettable war film made during the late communist era of the Soviet Union showing the bestial atrocities forced upon the Soviet people . I did have high hopes that being a Soviet film rather than a Russian one DESTINY OF A MAN would show the suffering the Soviets endured from 1941-45 . Does it ? Yes to a degree but there's some faults in the story telling

The story is told in flashback by Andrey Sokolov . He is taking his son for a walk in the countryside and meets a man and tells him of his wartime service . Conscripted in to the army as a driver he is captured by the Germans early in the war . He suffers deprivation as he's used as slave labour , sees comrades murdered by the Nazis , comes close death several times . Escapes and makes it back to his own lines where he's treated as a hero . He finds his wife and daughter died during an air raid and as the last days of the war take place his last child , a Red Army officer is killed in the Battle Of Berlin . Devastated Sokolov finds some comfort when he finds an orphan and adopts him as his son

It's not a film that has a strong central plot . It is rather episodic but where it succeeds is showing the brutality of the Nazi regime against conquered people . Caputured officers , political commissars and Jews were shot out of hand and as Sokolov finds himself behind Nazi lines there's a scene where people go in to a camp with a large chimney bellowing smoke . The implication is stark and obvious - you enter via the front gate and leave via the chimney

Ironically by drawing attention to the murderous intent of Nazism it leaves some plot holes involving Sokolov . He escapes from a forced labour detail and hides in the countryside for four days and is then recaptured . But would the Nazis allow an escaped prisoner to live ? Lkewise a brutal SS camp commander says he's going to execute Sokolov but then changes his mind because Sokolov can hold his drink

There's another unlikelihood and that is when Sokolov escapes to the Soviet front lines kidnapping a German officer with important documents and being lauded as a hero , but would this have happened in real life ? It's a forgotten point of history that Soviet prisoners captured during the war would receive little sympathy from their leaders after being liberated . Many of them would be sent on a death march to Soviet gulags . It's disappointing that this aspect is never referred to , especially since Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev instigated a de-Stalination program in the late 1950s at the time this film was made

That said it's very much a humanist type of film showing the triumph of the human will in the face of great adversity and all these type of films suffer from the same flaw . The Japanese film trilogy THE HUMAN CONDITION is similar in some ways . But DESTINY OF A MAN doesn't suffer from the sugary artificial aspects of Hollywood and for that we should be thankful

Buried under the mountain of clichés that typically entail a war film (although perhaps not so pronounced for the era), Fate of a Man is a genuinely emotional, well crafted movie that deftly handles the subjects of loss and resolve. What differentiates Bondarchuk's film from the litany of uninspired works, from any nationality, is the prowess with which he employs said mountain of clichés not just as a device to prop the plot upon, but instead as a means to explore the depths of the human trauma that results from war.

Under the relative creative freedom the "Thaw" provided, Bondarchuk's work is highly subjective and seemingly draws influence from Italian neorealism. Sokolov is a man who lived contentedly, before the war took everything from him. The story is divulged from his first person account, intimately executed through voice over. Each shot is visual progression in his emotional journey. The neorealist value of characters' space and their movement through it realizes this sense of progression. To cite an example, we simply have to look at buildings and characters' relation to them. Solokov meets his wife constructing a home. Prewar life is warmly attached to these buildings (homes and factories), a sense of fulfillment and love residing within. Returning home after the war we see shots of lumbering skeletons of bombed out factories, everyday life stripped of the flesh that once gave it meaning. This sequence culminates in Sokolov's discovery of the crater where his family home once was. Attention to small details such as a bed frame sticking out of the puddle of water in the crater make it especially heart wrenching. Speaking more specifically about physically inhabiting a space, there are a couple of striking shots. One example is in the scene where the Nazi's call out men from a line for execution. After the doctor who helps Sokolov is removed from his place in the line, the camera lingers on the empty space where he once was for several seconds. It's small moments like these that make the audience really internalize the sense of loss rather than just sigh a quick mandatory, "Awww."

There are moments in the film where the melodrama reaches distasteful limits, along with some poorly conceptualized and executed editing (ex. Water on the lens to fade in and out of early flashbacks). However, Fate of a Man is a special film, improperly served in this brief review.

Good direction, I believe, and good B/W shots and photography. It's even not the propaganda that kills this film, it's rather its unshamed use throughout the movie, with not even an attempt to radicate it in some more higher moral value. In that way "Fate of a Man" ends out to be not other than a plethora of common places, clichées, one after the other.

Nazis are evil, of course. Who can deny it? A bad Nazi kicks a Soviet prisoner of war off a cliff to his death; sterotypical scenes of prisoners ill-treated in a concentration camp; German commander playing with the life of a prisoner just for fun;... OK. Is that all the reasons Nazis were bad? Not a hint. The military valour of a Russian soldier; the Soviet pride in winning the Stalingrad battle... again, who can deny it?

Sokolov, the protagonist, returning from the war, finds out that his entire family has been slaughtered. So he kind of adopts a little war-orphan boy (some Alyosha), as a sort of replacement for the son an daughters he has been deprived of. I was going to value this film 6/10 (which is a "passing" mark, in my opinion - and which is the evaluation I give in IMDb). But, then, at the end, the audience (of which I am a part) comes to know that Sokolov has a heart disease, and it is not sure that he will live enough to care for the future of Alyosha.

Finally, a few seconds before the end, a title card reads like this (in the English translation provided by a popular online video platform): "I'd like to believe that this Russian (meaning Sokolov), this man of unbreakable will, will stick out, and that the boy will grow at his father's side, into a man that can endure anything, shall his country ever call upon him to do so." I can quite understand it in war-time movies, or in films made just a little time after 1945, But in 1959?! That made me realize that the evaluation of the film should be almost a little less from "passing".