Peter Weir is a rare filmmaker. Seven years separate Master and Commander of this new feature. A quiet man, unknown to the general public, however, author of several famous films: Witness, The Poets and missing The Truman Show. He adapted the novel by Slavomir Rawicz tells that in 1940, the escape of prisoners in a gulag in Siberia. The fugitives are going through more than 10,000 km in hostile conditions, crossing the desert furnace Goby and the peaks of the Himalayas. Only three of them escape.
The film is inspired by real events but the truth of events is now being questioned, for this reason that Peter Weir chose to bring the story and the characters a great deal of fiction. A feeling reinforced by a Hollywood convention usual, the Russian and Polish speaking English with an accent forced. But this minor reservation should not detract from the value of a film that starts in a very classical headed for the wildest lands.
rough photography of cinematographer Russell Boyd (faithful to the filmmaker) and the simplicity of the staging of Peter Weir accurately recreate the appalling reality of the gulag. However, the filmmaker delivers fast its protagonists do not filming their escape, one of the oddities that dot the film. Indeed, the characters are not well identified, without a past, which mainly rely on their instincts to survive and support their "comrades" to overcome the cold. The film, free from the conventions of the genre, becomes a wandering through the world where the quest for freedom seems increasingly endangered. And despite some improbabilities, the director was smart enough not to increase the dramatic adventures. Along the way, we happen to complain that even this breakaway is not more dangerous!
But nature will take over and these men will cross the mountains (in the literal sense of the word) to do not see death in the long way. Buoyed by excellent actors (including Colin Farrell leisurely strolling player in Russian thug!) Pathways to Freedom makes us enjoy the great outdoors that Peter Weir films with the extent that he already knew and he has delivered a moving testimony of people who have used their resources to overcome recent barbarity of the Stalinist regime unfortunately little attention in Western cinema.
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