Synopsis
War and Peace (1968) is Sergei Bondarchuk's four-part screen adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel, and you can watch online on iFILM. Early-nineteenth-century Russia: ballrooms, duels, restless souls, and the storm of Napoleon's invasion drawing closer.
Three lives carry the whole saga. Young Natasha Rostova (Lyudmila Savelyeva) learns to love and to get it wrong. Prince Andrei Bolkonsky (Vyacheslav Tikhonov) hunts for meaning on the battlefield and, lying wounded under the sky at Austerlitz, sees how little his old pride ever weighed. And the clumsy, kind-hearted Pierre Bezukhov — played by Bondarchuk himself — stumbles through high society, captivity and the burning of Moscow toward an answer of his own. Their paths cross and part against the war of 1812, where Tolstoy always sets the private heart above the generals' maps.
The shoot ran close to six years. Bondarchuk staged Borodino with thousands of extras and a camera sweeping over the field, a scale Soviet cinema had never attempted. The result took the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the top prize at the Moscow festival. It is long and demanding, but no one has filmed Tolstoy at this full height since. Stream War and Peace (1968) online on iFILM.
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