(“Nimed marmortahvlil” was screened in Ottawa on November 22nd, after the celebrations marking the 55th anniversary of the Ottawa Estonian Society.)

The Estonians have produced a world class film and it shows. The acting and battle scenes are excellent. Although the plot is predicable, the movie flows well so that time went by fairly quickly. The English sub-titles were accurate.

The story is about a group of high school students who volunteer to fight as infantry during Estonia’s war of independence immediately after the First World War. The ending of the film shows a youngster looking at their names still chalked on their old unused classroom blackboard and this symbolic act gives the film its name. A minor criticism might be that the actors seem a bit too old to be high school students and the battalion commander is definitely past active field service age. The historical accuracy of the film struck me as acceptable except for some very minor technical glitches. One that the older generation with military backgrounds would have noticed was that the Russian Moisin-Nagant rifles used seemed to have barrels that were at least 25 cm too short for the time period. As well, the producers must have been striving for a “PG” rating or better, given the lack of coarse language and the kid glove treatment of the physical love interest between the hero and heroine. I didn’t mind this in the least, since film “realism” lately seems to have gotten out of hand.

Driving home I mulled over several things. One of them was the irony that in the movie the main battle scene was against a battalion of Red Latvian infantry and that most of the Canadian Estonians in the audience had just arrived after an evening in the local Latvian Lutheran Church. While it is no doubt true that there were battles against red Latvian soldiers, the main enemies were both the Soviets and Germans. While it is probable that the red Latvian rifle regiments, which acted as Lenin’s Praetorian Guard and largely caused the Bolshevik revolution to succeed, I thought it might have been better had they portrayed a battle against the main adversaries. Perhaps I felt this way because the mother of my children had parents from Latvia who were also refugees from communism. The film, to its credit, portrayed the common tragedy with Estonians that close family members often fought on both sides. In their defense, it could be maintained the Russian revolution was still fresh and Bolshevism might not have revealed its true nature to all of them yet.

Another thing which I expected, was the way the Russians were stereotyped, as either totally evil (the chief villain was a Russified Estonian who attempted to rape the heroine) or as totally incompetent (either an obvious Asiatic who had no idea where he was, or the drunken slobs trying to get lights for the self-rolled gummy cigarettes hanging from their lips). At one point, a slovenly Russian soldier asks the hero if he is Latvian since he seems to have trouble understanding Russian. I was also somewhat puzzled over the relevance of the opening scenes where senior German officers, obviously in charge, speak a few lines, and then there is no further reference to Germans -notwithstanding that my understanding of Estonian victory day is that it commemorates a battle against them which took place in Latvia. Perhaps I missed something, or it got edited out.

Anyway, I didn’t feel cheated and the movie is one I would recommend both as entertainment and a learning experience.

Märkmed: