The Greatest War and Peace film ever made !

Part of the plan for reading War and Peace over January was to toast the completion of the book with a screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1967 film adaptation. Catching a near-7 hour film is a rare treat in my house, so there was considerable excitement on Friday night when I dug out my 5-disc Artificial Eye DVD edition. This was just my second time sitting down with the film since picking up the AE set back in 2007, and my recollection of the film had faded over time. Certainly the poor presentation of the film had been forgotten, and while many of the flaws and inadequacies of the Russico transfer could be overlooked a decade ago, upon completion of the first disc, I returned the set to the shelf and promptly ordered the Criterion edition – hugely expensive, but those first two hours of Bondarchuk’s film swept me away with its sheer exuberance – the wild subjective handheld camerawork, and the film’s astonishing scale with its God’s eye view of battlefields strewn with thousands of extras and giant columns of drifting smoke. It’s been a surprisingly faithful adaptation so far, and I enjoyed Bondarchuk’s treatment of favourite scenes from the early part of the novel - Pierre’s dual with Dolokhov in a knee-deep snowfield, Prince Andrei’s return home from the Battle of Austerlitz to find his wife in labor, and so on. As if Sergei Bondarchuk didn’t have enough to do with helming the production, he also appears in the role of Pierre, and initially I felt he was miscast, looking a little older than the character in the novel, but I soon found Bondarchuk’s sad, watery eyes most agreeable. I’m eagerly awaiting the Criterion edition now…