Ivan's Childhood

Ivan's Childhood (1962)

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

First Viewed: 5/5/08
Starring Nikolai Burlyayev as Ivan
IMDB Page

Andrei Tarkovsky's first film follows a pretty, precocious, and snobbish boy who serves as a spy for the Russian Army during World War II. We first see Ivan in a recurring, surreal sequence in which he inhabits a beautiful area that may as well be the Garden of Eden. This idyllic vision of the world is shattered when the boy wakes up to hell on earth. He is suddenly in the present, gunfire surrounding him, trying to survive after his most recent spying mission has gone wrong. Although Tarkovsky includes a number of other day-dreaming sequences that hearken back to the boy's vision of his life before the war, none are more effective - the rest feel overblown and do not fit in well with the rest of the narrative - as the visceral punch provided by this first one.

Ivan eventually finds his way back to headquarters where Lt. Col. Gryaznov treats him like an adopted son. But after the failure of this recent mission, Gryaznov suddenly acts aloof towards Ivan and decides to send him to military school believing, ironically, that war is no place for children. Ivan, being of the assertive and petulant type, runs away, gets caught, and in a compromise, is sent to the front lines for one final, vague spying mission against the Nazis that involves sneaking across a river with several comrades.

This is a relatively large-scale story to recreate and Tarkovsky struggles to find a balance between making the film a more intimate experience as seen through a boy's perspective of war and an epic film with wonderfully decrepit sets that reflect the scarring effects of war. The reason that Ivan is driven to help defeat the Nazis is because they have killed his family; however, this is only revealed off-hand in a conversation by his comrades, an unfortunate decision that does not allow us to effectively delve into Ivan's perspective. The film also gets side-tracked with a plot-line that involves a shy woman in the army who faces sexual harassment at the hands of Ivan's sex-starved comrades.

Tarkovsky tries to relay, however fitfully, the ways in which war mobilizes seemingly normal people to do the most bizarre, horrible, and courageous things. His cinematography is gorgeous, but the wonderfully inventive visuals gloss over the film's failure to offer deeper insights into war and the motivations of its participants.

Rating: 7/10

The film is so beautifully shot - I have to share more screenshots.