The music in this movie was so haunting that I bought the record years ago, and when I just saw the movie again on tv, it hit me again. It simply choked me up.
Together with the sad comment on war, the film showed how the rural people of the Soviet Union coped and the primitive life their system offered them.
"...the film showed how the rural people of the Soviet Union coped and the primitive life their system offered them."
Of course, each time when the Soviet film is in question, all points to how bad the communist system was ... Comments like that above make me sick.
System didn't offered them such a primitive life, but war... By the way, Soviet Union was attacked by one extremely capitalist country - the Nazi Germany.
Great movie. It show what real Slavic soul is :)
Ballad of a soldier contains passages which are a PERFECT synthesis of visuals, dialog, and music, all poetically wrapped together, supported by transcendental acting by the two leads, each only 19 years old, and each appearing in cinema for the first time. This kind of magic is one in a million.
The only movie that comes close to the same experience for me is Doctor Zhivago, a very different kind of work, but possessed of the same kind of magic in places.