Film: As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me
Year of production: 2001
UK Release date: 6th June 2011
Distributor: Second Sight
Certificate: 12
Running time: 158 mins
Director: Hardy Martins
Starring: Bernhard Bettermann, Iris Böhm, Anatoliy Kotenyov, Michael Mendl, Irina Pantaeva
Genre: Drama/War
Format: DVD
Country of Production: Germany
Language: German/Russian
Review by: James Garner
Prisoner of war films have been capturing the imagination of viewers since the 1920s, and while most of them follow the same escape-from-peril formula, As Far As My Feet Will carry me is unusual in that it tells the story of a German World War II soldier who escapes from a Soviet labour camp. Based on a 1955 novel by Josef Martin Bauer that was adapted into a 1959 German TV miniseries, director Hardy Martins’s 2001 drama doesn’t try to be an exercise in revisionist history, but it does succeed in offering an alternative to the stereotypical depictions of German soldiers as unthinking automatons.
As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me begins with soldier Clemens Forell (an alias of Cornelius Rost, who chose to keep his real name secret fearing KGB reprisals) saying goodbye to his wife and young daughter as he is sent off to war. Before we know it, he is captured by Soviet forces and sentenced to twenty-five years of hard labour in a Siberian lead mine.
Conditions in the camp are brutal, and Forell (Bernhard Bettermann) wastes no time in plotting an escape, but after his first attempt he is quickly recaptured and severely beaten by his fellow prisoners. Eventually, some four years later, he escapes again with the help of the terminally ill camp doctor, and so begins an epic, almost 7,000 mile journey.
Forell’s long escape is fraught with danger at every turn, and he is chased all the way by the camp leader, Lieutenant Kamenev, but while he feels he cannot trust anybody, he receives varying degrees of help from several sources. First, he hooks up with two gold prospectors, Anastas and Seymon, but he is soon on his own again after Seymon murders Anastas and pushes Forell down a slope, paranoid that his gold will be stolen. Next, Forell is rescued from wolves by nomadic Chukchi herders, one of whom, Irina, nurses him back to health falls in love with him. Forced to leave when it becomes apparent that Soviet forces are closing in on him, Forell then sets out on an arduous journey to central Asia, where he is helped by a Jewish man to cross the border into Iran.
In Iran, he is arrested on suspicion of being a Soviet spy, and it looks as though his escape has come to an end in the cruellest of ways, just as he is on the verge of being reunited with his family...
Filmed on location in Germany, Belarus and Uzbekistan, As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me has an epic sweep that is visually powerful and beautiful to watch, but in terms of the narrative, there are elements of the film that feel overly contrived and implausible. Forell’s brief romance with Irina, for example, borders on the absurd as a result of one particular scene in a tent that could almost be a parody of Dances With Wolves. The slush of the natural environment is one thing, but Martins seems to have confused that with the kind of slushy sentimentality that you’d expect from a Kevin Costner vanity project. Forell even develops a close bond with a husky that is later shot when trying to protect him, but, fortunately, this is not Dances With Huskies, and Martins does not milk the relationship between man and beast. Not too much that is.
Sentimentality is one thing, but a bigger problem is the constant pursuit of Forell by Kamenev. The fact that Forell’s stoic pursuer spends so long and travels so far in his attempts to recapture him is difficult to believe, and at times borders on the preposterous. Kamenev’s character is not particularly well developed, and he is played with a one-dimensional solemnity by Anatoliy Kotenyov, so there is little evidence of why he is so obsessed with Forell. Similarly, the idea that Kamenev is permitted by his superiors to leave his post for such great lengths of time to chase Forell is implausible.
Perhaps Martins is making concessions to Hollywood-style melodrama in an attempt to reach as wide an audience as possible, but he is on much more solid ground when he avoids the temptation to overplay his hand. The relationship between Forell and Dr Stauffer (Michael Mendl), the camp doctor who helps him escape, is far more convincing. The two men barely know each other, but as Stauffer is terminally ill, he takes the decision not to waste the provisions he has carefully hidden away and urges Forell to make the escape he knows he cannot endure, asking Forell to pass on a message to his wife if he succeeds.
In spite of its flaws, and a musical soundtrack that is sometimes annoyingly overwrought, As Far As My Feet Will Carry Me is a highly entertaining film that succeeds more often than it fails. Bettermann is thoroughly convincing as Forell, and his understated performance goes a long way in ensuring that the film’s more melodramatic tendencies do not derail it.
While As Far As My Feet Will Carry may differ from the majority of prisoner of war films in telling the story of a German soldier’s escape, in most other respects, it is a conventional POW escape drama; full of dramatic twists, heightened emotion and epic adventure. Overall, it’s an entertaining, though not particularly convincing account of one man’s great escape. JG
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