A trivial personal plotline and a strain of maudlin patriotism undermine Nikolay Lebedev’s shaky telling of the Soviet side of the story
Taking place in the wings of the Nuremberg trial, this Soviet-side political thriller, first released back in 2023, features a scene in which the crowd turns on a boa-draped Hollywood floozy in town to entertain the troops. A case of mea culpa for director Nikolay Lebedev, who trivialises the momentous issues emerging from the courtroom by dressing the legal stuff up with a tenuous and shakily handled plotline about a missing soldier, in an attempt to make his film the Russian answer to Saving Private Ryan.
After his brother goes MIA in the vicinity of the soon-to-be-historic city, Red Army intelligence officer Igor Volgin (Sergey Kempo) wangles a post translating for the Soviet delegation. He’s approached by Lena (Lyubov Aksyonova), a Russian wastrel with a perfectly coiffed bob despite months of forced labour in a German munitions factory; she claims to have run into his sibling, an artist, in captivity. But she is also feeding information to Helmut (Wolfgang Cerny), a Nazi resistance diehard who believes Göring (Carsten Norgaard) and company should be accountable only to German courts.
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