Dva Fyodora (The Two Fedors). 1959. USSR. Directed by Marlen Khutsiev. Screenplay by Valeri Savchenko. With Vasiliy Shukshin, Nikolai Chursin, Tamara Syomina. In Russian; English subtitles. 88 min.
With its moral shadings and evocations of wartime devastation and rebirth, Khutsiev’s provocative and poignant Two Fedors is the missing link between Rossellini’s Germany, Year Zero (1947) and Tarkovsky’s Ivan’s Childhood (1962). In this similarly bleak vision of past and future, a decorated war veteran (the Siberian-born Shukshin, in his first major role) befriends a scrappy orphan boy with whom he shares the same name, Fedor, and a similar fate. Against the romanticized image of Russians as heroic and self-sacrificing, Khutsiev portrays ordinary people starved for human affection after wartime years of hunger, loss, and false hope in a ruinous ideology.