Word: ivans
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TomCourtenay's Ivan is a large part of the problem. His face is too expressive and his presence too strong to portray a lisping, faceless prisoner. His third person narration throughout the film locates him as a sophisticated, detached observer who understands all his own pain. But this observation is completely incongruous with the ingenuous naiviete with which he asks a fellow prisoner "Where does the moon go each month if it doesn't break up into the stars...
...ambiguity recurs in each of Ivan's moments of passion. Every prisoner is responsible for keeping the large white letters on his uniform legible. Ivan shuffles through the snow to the old painter who traces the outline of "S 854" on his cloth cap. An expression of grief passes over Ivan's face. But Wrede cannot decide if this is the expression of the naive and crafty peasant or the existential hero locked in an unjustified fate...
...three eating scenes successfully convey the pain fundamental to Ivan's state. But only because the image of a worn, cold body gaping over a breakfast of sticky yellow boiled grass cannot help but be effective. Courtenay is a convincing actor; but his pained body cannot sustain the entire film...
After breakfast Ivan and his work group go off to a construction sight two miles away to lay bricks. The guards bark at them to march in rows of five and to the sound of ringing bells a long column of dark suited men walk against the snow and sky. As they approach the work sight Ivan tells us in his third person voice that the prisoner's food is rationed according to the work rate his group achieves. The prisoners are not goaded by guards but by one another: "The authorities had found a way to make us work...
...workers build up each others' enthusiasm with such lines as "Ivan you lay the bricks and I'll carry the mortar. We'll work twice as fast that way." Like almost all the dialogue in the film this line is admirably a direct translation from Solzhenitsyn's novel. But it is spoken by a wide eyed young man with all the fresh enthusiasm of a high school quarterback preparing for the next play. Solzhenitsyn can tone down the sense of imminent death in his novel because his Russian audience was well aware of the destitution of the prisoners' lives...