The Cranes Are Flying
The Cranes Are Flying is remarkable in so many ways. The only film from the USSR to win the Palme d’Or at Cannes, it is also a reminder that an epic doesn’t need epic length to tell its story. A simple story at that. Two people very much in love. Slightly diffident Boris (Aleksey Batalov) and feisty, beautiful Veronica (Tatyana Samoylova). He’s slightly punching above his weight, and knows it, and it’s this that probably tips Boris’s hand when he is weighing up whether to volunteer to go to the front, as the Nazis advance on Moscow. This in spite of the fact that composer Mark (Aleksandr Shvorin), Boris’s handsome cousin, has designs … Read more