Franz + Polina

Mikhail Segal's debut feature film Franz + Polina is another entry in a series of recent Russian World War II films that attempt to “humanize” the German enemy.[1] The picture opens with an inverted homage to Elem Klimov's 1985 masterpiece Come and See (Idi i smotri): a group of boy children are playing on a sandy river bank. Unlike the grimy urchins of Come and See, who are playing war games and digging for weapons, these children are entirely carefree, cheerfully splashing about in the company of young adult males. When the young men dress, the illusion is shattered. They are members of the SS Death's Head Battalion. This nod to Come and See is as unsurprising as it is unsettling. Franz + Polina is based on a screenplay by the late Ales' Adamovich—the writer, historian, and politician who wrote the screenplay for Come and See . Those familiar with Adamovich's dogged determination to preserve the memory of the German army's genocide in Belorussia in 1943 must wonder how much of Franz + Polina is “Adamovich” and how much reflects the views of Vladimir Stepanovich, director Segal, and cinematographer Maksim Trapo, all of whom are credited as the authors of the film's “dialogue.” Franz + Polina 's sentimentalized depiction of young love between wartime enemies is distinctly alien to Adamovich's gestalt.