One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Caspar Wrede directed this bleak adaptation of Alexander Solzhynitsyn’s short novel in 1970. The film concerns a single day in a nightmarish prison compound somewhere near the Arctic circle. Shot mostly in huge close-up, we see the workers struggling to survive – hiding food, trading for tobacco, attempting to avoid assignment to a job on open steppe where there is no shelter and a risk of freezing to death. For minor infractions, workers are sent to “the cells” where there is apparently no heat, a punishment tantamount to a death sentence. The movie is, more or less, convincing. It can’t show the eponymous hero, played by the handsome Tom Courtney, as dilapidated, miserable, and emaciated as he would undoubtedly be in these circumstances – after all, he’s a famous movie star – but otherwise the imagery of the ice and snow and cold is completely persuasive. The film seems to have been shot in the Arctic somewhere, on a treeless and glacial expanse of tundra, and the exteriors, most of which involve building walls, look realistically cold and dismal. The film is completely faithful to its source, relentlessly grim and factual, with a voice-over making sure that we don’t miss any specific features of this hell. It makes no point of any kind other than the fact that it’s awful to be confined in a prison camp. We don’t get any sense for the lives of these convicts before their incarceration. Everything is focused on the day-to-day struggle for existence, a herculean task that leaves no time for metaphysics, personalities, or back-story. Austere and hopeless, the film resembles something by Samuel Beckett, although without the humor, and is too grim to be recommended. (Wrede was a Finnish director who worked most extensively in British theater. He made a handful of films. One Day, which is a British-Norwegian co-production, was broadcast by Swedish TV into Finland in the early seventies and promptly banned in that place.)