High Infidelity : Sergei Bodrov's Film Adaptation of Tolstoy's “Prisoner of the Caucasus”

서지정보

· 발행기관 : 동국대학교 영상미디어센터
· 수록지 정보 : 씨네포럼 / 19호 / 169 ~ 194페이지
· 저자명 : Robert Cardullo

초록

The film Prisoner of the Mountains (1996), by the Russian director Sergei Bodrov, is about cultural clash and the moral enlightenment as well as emotional awakening that, under the right circumstances (in this instance, ironically, those of war and captivity), can come of it. This was not exactly a new subject when the film was released―the attempt to reveal a human bond between characters who are otherwise military enemies, political opponents, religious rivals, or racial opposites―but it need not have been in the hands of a sensitive writer-director like Bodrov, interested in something other than sentimentality, hyperbole, and oversimplification.
This essay considers in detail Bodrov's cinematic adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's story “A Prisoner of the Caucasus” (1870). The Russian director, along with his co-scenarists Arif Aliyev and Boris Giller, transposes the action from the Chechnya of some 140 years ago (where and when Tolstoy did a portion of his military service) to the same general area today, on the northern slopes of the Caucasus Mountains, where the Russian army is simultaneously governing and fighting the Muslim population prior to that army's withdrawal in August 1996. Prisoner of the Mountains is not the first Russian movie to feature the Caucasus in the wake of the Chechnyan wars; it was preceded by Vladimir Khotinenko's The Muslim (1995), then followed by Aleksei Balabanov's Brother (1997), Alexander Rogozhkin's The Checkpoint (1999), Andrei Konchalovsky's House of Fools (2002), Mariya Saakyan's The Lighthouse (2006), and Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra (2007). On account of its more balanced perspective, richer characterization, and added or updated elements, Bodrov's Prisoner of the Mountains, in the opinion of this essay's author, is superior to Tolstoy's “A Prisoner of the Caucasus”―and may be the best of the films yet made that feature the Caucasus during the period of the Chechnyan wars.

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