Back in the USSR

"The Cranes Are Flying" transports us to the Soviet Union at the start of the German invasion in WWII. It is surprisingly realistic and not woke.

No spoilers below.

The endgame of wokeness is Communism, such as equality of outcome. The film does not have an agenda on this front. Women are very much in the workforce in the film, but that was accurate for the time, and it also happened in America during WWII.

My wife was born in the Soviet Union, in an occupied territory. She remembers many of the things shown in the film, like primitive stoves and handwashing, which persisted decades later. I asked her if a bust of Lenin in one scene was realistic, and she said, "oh yes, everyone had to have one", adding that at school the boys would vandalize the school's Lenin statue and then the principal would assemble the whole school to admonish everyone at length and put them to work repairing the statue. And then it would happen again. I asked if the clothes and living conditions were glamorized for the film, and she said it was realistic overall.

The first third of the film is just delightful. Good acting, inobtrusive cinematography, and realistic sets left me free to be fascinated by this world I had never before seen. However, later heavy-handed cinematography and overdramatic acting pulled me out of immersion. Some of the camera effects were impressive for 1957, but the flying cranes were animated by people who had never seen flying cranes (but perhaps had seen flying pterodactyls).

I did not expect to like this film, but I found myself mesmerized by this immersive peek into the Soviet Union. Just don't expect much war; it is mostly a romance-drama.