Nocturne (1966 film)

Nocturne (Noktirne) is a 1966 Soviet war drama film. Based on the story of the same name by Jean Griva, a former fighter of the International Brigades.

Plot
The last stage of the Spanish Civil War. The Republican army retreated beyond the Pyrenees. By chance, the paths of the Latvian Georges, a fighter in one of the detachments, and the French woman, nurse Yvette, cross. They fell in love, but got lost in the chaos of war. Yvette managed to cross the border and hide in her homeland, and Georges ended up in a concentration camp.

Several years passed, France was occupied by Nazi troops. In a small Marseilles restaurant, Georges, who escaped from the camp, meets his beloved. Both join the partisans at one of the secret mountain bases. When the main part of the detachment went on a mission, the camp was attacked by punitive forces. In a fierce battle, Yvette dies, not long after waiting for her comrades to return.

Cast

 * Pola Raksa as Yvette
 * Gunārs Cilinskis as Georges
 * Juris Plavins as Leingren
 * Vladimir Vasiliev as lanky soldier
 * Jānis Zenne as Denis

Production
To make the film more authentic, director Rostislav Goryaev traveled to Moscow to consult with Ilya Ehrenburg.

Filming took place on the streets of Riga, in the pavilions of the Riga Film Studio, in Armenia (where the “Spanish” scenes were filmed). Mountain France was reproduced in the Tien Shan.

To enhance the artistic image, it was decided to conditionally divide the script into three short stories, each of which begins with a quote from a literary classic. The first is a dialogue from William Shakespeare's play “Romeo and Juliet”, the second is an excerpt from a poem by the French poet Paul Eluard, and in the finale is a line from Garcia Lorca: “Be quiet... when I'm dead!”

Critical response
M. Lesovoy (Soviet Screen): The fight against fascism and love are intertwined in the destinies of the heroes Latvian Georges and frenchwoman Yvette, who left their distant homes to stop fascism. But the fight against fascism did not end in Spain; it only began there. And when the Nazis captured France, Georges, who had escaped from a concentration camp, made his way to the town where Yvette lived. Here, with his French friends, as before with his Spanish friends, he continues his battle with Nazism until his last breath, until victory.

Mikhail Trofimenkov, in his 2016 review, noted that the film is not so much about war, but about the simplest of the simplest things on earth  about the meeting of a man and a woman in war. "Nocturne" is nakedly simple. The agony of the republic brought together the Latvian Georges and the frenchwoman Yvette for one night. The Second World War reunited them in the French Resistance and separated them forever: there was no death in Soviet cinema more terrible than the death of Yvette. He was played by Gunārs Cilinskis, she by the Polish star, shyly sexy woman-girl Pola Raksa. But the nationality of the heroes and actors is purely arbitrary. In the international brigades everyone had one nationality: anti-fascist.