Mira Sorvino is a British/American journalist who insists on reporting from Leningrade. The city is under siege by the Germans and bombed daily. Sorvino is wounded and taken in by a Russian family, whose miseries she shares thereafter. The isolation of Leningrade lasts for years and one and a half million people die in the city, either from the bombardment or from starvation.
I don't know why it's not a better, a more gripping movie than it is. It's dramatic material. Everyone's life is as tenuous as those of the families in Anne Frank's attic. The performances are at least adequate but the plot focuses on events that should be peripheral to the main story.
I'll give an example. It develops, half-way through the film, that Mira Sorvino may be a stranded journalist (and audience proxy) but she is also the daughter of a White Russian general and was born in Russia herself. The White Russians fought the Bolsheviks for control of the state and lost. When the NKVD discovers that the British daughter of an old, exiled, harmless White Russian is at loose in a city where people are carving up live horses and eating dogs, they implement a search for her and it becomes dangerous for Mira Sorvino to leave the shabby, freezing apartment. Does anyone believe that? The director uses enormous close ups of people's face and the photography draws its colors from the ghoulish green end of the palette. It makes the actors look dirty and ugly. In fact, I was startled enough by the signs of aging in the principles that I recognized -- Mira Sorvino, Gabriel Byrne, and Armin Mueller-Stahl -- that it prompted me to run to a mirror for reassurance that the years hadn't caught up with me.
Sorvino does okay and handles her British accent acceptably, assuming she wasn't dubbed. And Byrne is just right for the small part of the lover who is lost for good. His face is a mask of tragedy anyway. But Mueller-Stahl as a stern, unfeeling German officer who orders his own nephew to his death? No, no. Armin Mueller-Stahl is somebody's fond uncle, a paragon of resigned humanitarianism.
At least this much can be said for the casting. In Europe, at the height of the Cold War, I saw movies that never played in the United States and was able to pick up the kinds of slight nuances in style and appearance that constituted propaganda. Some of the Russian and French films showed smiling, avuncular Soviet officers who wouldn't harm a fly but might be very effective leaders of a Gestalt therapy group, while the Americans in the picture were rich, fat, bumbling, stupid, and spoke with ludicrous accents. Of course, America was using the same techniques in its own movies but the simple devices had always slipped under the radar, taken for granted. No such accusations of propaganda can be made about "Attack on Leningrad." Everybody looks ugly, including the jowly Soviet leaders, one of whom bears a remote resemblance to Uncle Joe. Stalin isn't mentioned but many Russian citizens recognized that they were caught between two dictators. As one observer said at the time, "We preferred the one who spoke Russian."
Anyway, what we get to see is the effects of the siege on a diverse group of citizens -- an aristocratic theater star, a crippled kid, a mother who starves herself for her children's sake, a young woman who is a police officer. No mention of cannibalism. There wasn't even a law against it. The 900 people indicted had to be charged with "extreme banditry." But what's really needed is the context of the siege itself, instead of a story beginning in medias res. That might not have been necessary in Russia or in much of Europe, but it is essential for American audiences, many of whom seem to have strong opinions but little knowledge of foreign history. Not because they're dumb but because they have the same level of curiosity as, say, Elvis Presley. The singer was stationed in Germany but rarely got past the PX. Many of us seem to live in a kind of informational gated community. So -- what is Leningrad (or St. Petersburg) to us? What, or who, is Lake Ladoga and why was it important? A poll a few years ago revealed that a substantial number of school children believe that in World War II, Germany and the USSR fought on the same side.
It ought to be seen for its education value alone, regardless of its flaws as a piece of art.
