Running and Hiding

Coming out of 'Defiance' somebody sneezed without putting their hand to their mouth and we were all wrenched out of our brave war torn world and into modern day worries in a flash.

I am a big fan of the two actors who played the main protagonists in a family of four real life brothers who are the basis for this movie. So to see Daniel Craig and Leiv Schreiber as the two elder Bielski brothers was wonderful in terms of performance but also because, as a baby boomer brought up in Europe, I spent quite a lot of early childhood surrounded by ex soldiers. Our priest at school squeaked down the aisle on his wooden leg (blown off during the war) and I was taught piano by a woman whose left hand had been sheared in half by a buzz bomb. She played on and the vicar marched on and so I suppose you get to suss out flim flam soldiery very quickly when you see it on screen. For all that I actually saw no war, this film does seem to incorporate the kind of persona those men had even though perhaps the two Russian army partisans were cast more for their fabulous faces than their manly physiques.

On the down side, I don't remember European forests being quite so beautifully light and I missed the feeling of wildlife but the brothers are not given the moral high ground exclusively and there are several vignettes of forest life that bring the chill and famine a little too close for comfort. I liked the way the young brother grew into his authority and felt a strange sense of the wild gamble that life in a war must be,with all its unlikely good fortune and heartbreaking bad.

On a personal side, it is amazing to me that performers cast in such a film do not do basic weight loss diets working on these stories. You just can't slim down chubby cheeks with make up and it does only take a very small effort to get it off. I was stunned when working on Bruce Beresford's 'Paradise Road' how few of us took the extremely careful dietary regime we were asked to go on seriously. One of the extras used to walk down the lunch table laid out for the crew (no holds barred scrumptious food to keep a physically active person going for 12 hours) and send her husband down the actors table (lean but highly nutritious food) - she looked like a pork barrel all the way through the movie and she wasn't the only one. There were some shots of 'starving' people in this film that make you long for a Jenny Craig representative.