Virtually nothing in BALLAD OF A SOLDIER is realistic. For openers, nearly all of the characters are unusually handsome or comely, with radiantly healthy hair, unblemished complexions, strong facial features, and clear, lambent, intelligent eyes. Nearly all of them are also unbelievably good-natured and compassionate, generous and noble, unhesitatingly willing to sacrifice their own happiness to help others. The windswept fields of grain and sun-dappled forests glow with beauty. Everything about the film's portrayal of Mother Russia and the hard-working folk who live there exemplifies simplicity and moral goodness. It's as though we were no longer looking at the nasty planet you and I live on, but rather at some magical and otherworldly realm of ethically elevated peasants. The story takes place against the backdrop of World War Two. There is one scene that shows us a signalman fleeing on foot from four German tanks, one that shows us a passenger train in flames, and many that show us the devastation caused by aerial bombardment, but even these scenes seem more stylized and atmospheric than realistic.

All this having been said, I will quickly add that virtually nothing in Shakespeare's plays is realistic either. (Only a few of us believe in ghosts and witches and fairies, and fewer still strut around giving speeches in iambic pentameter.) The Bard wasn't interested in being realistic. He was interested in reality. And sometimes the deepest truths of reality are best illuminated by art that is nonrealistic.

If you get a chance to see BALLAD OF A SOLDIER, think of it as a tragic allegory or myth in which the fragile but infinitely valuable emotion of love refuses to let itself be compromised and debased even when it is being crushed under the brutal machinery of war. Director Grigori Chukhrai, a veteran who was wounded while fighting on the front lines, idealizes his characters rather than depicting them realistically because they are not meant to be what people really are but rather what people should be – what they might eventually become if they allowed themselves to be governed solely by love. There are many poignant love stories embedded in the movie, some so brief that they're over and gone before you realize they're there, some developed more fully over the span of a few minutes, and two that Chukhrai dwells on at length. One of these focuses on the awakening of romantic love between a boy and girl who are so fresh and innocent they never dare to kiss each other. The other depicts the deep, aching love between a mother and the son from whom she has been separated. These two central love stories are as sweet and sad as anything I've ever seen on film. Chukhrai's allegory may be nonrealistic, but the message it conveys is totally real and totally true. Love doesn't have a chance when the tanks roll and the bombs fall.

Chukhrai's exaltation of love and condemnation of war would have less force if BALLAD OF A SOLDIER were not also brilliant in its cinematic technique. The dramatic camera work of Vladimir Nikolaev and Era Savelyeva reminds me of Eisenstein, and so does Mariya Timofeyeva's dynamic editing. Mikhail Ziv's musical score swells with emotional intensity. Vladimir Ivashov and Zhanna Prokhorenko, teenage amateurs whom Chukhrai plucked out of acting school after he decided that professionals would lack the pristine youthfulness he wanted in his main characters, give inspired, heartfelt, energetic performances as Alyosha and Shura.

BALLAD OF A SOLDIER won numerous secondary prizes at film festivals in England, Iran, Italy, and the USA, and it was given the coveted Lenin Prize in Russia. But perhaps the most appropriate tribute came at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960, a year when masterpieces by Antonioni, Bergman, Bunuel, and Fellini vied with the headache-inducing American epic BEN HUR for the top awards. Touched by the Russian film's unabashed sentiment and Chukhrai's belief in the potential for goodness that lies within all of us, the judges gave BALLAD OF A SOLDIER a special prize for "high humanism and outstanding quality."