100 Days Before the Command

August 2025 100 Days Before the Command 100DaysBefore.jpg DVD cover Hussein Erkenov Aleksandr Zosimenko Vladimir KholodovYuri Polyakov Vladimir ZamanskyArmen DzhigarkhanyanOleg VasilkovRoman GrekovValeri TroshinAleksandr ChislovMikhail Solomatin Vladislav Menshikov Galina DmitriyevaVladimir Portnov Peccadillo Pictures 1990 y 67 minutes Soviet Union Russian Gorky Film Studio 100 Days Before the Command (ru Сто дней до приказа, translit. Sto dney do prikaza) is a 1990 Soviet drama film directed by Hussein Erkenov, inspired by the eponymous novel written by Yuri Polyakov. In order to get Gorki Studios to provide funding for the film, Erkenov and writers Yuri Polyakov and Vladimir Golodov provided the studio with two fake scripts in addition to the real one. The Soviet government censored the film and banned its export. It was not screened outside of the country until the Berlin International Film Festival in 1994 after Erkenov founded his own sales company. Synopsis The film exposes the humiliations and cruelties inflicted on young conscripts in the Soviet Red Army by their military superiors at a training camp in Central Russia. There are several detailed accounts of disturbing incidents; including a superior officer urinating on a sleeping conscript, another dumps a bowl of hot soup on a young soldier at mess. The film has no narrative structure and rather than telling a story uses vignettes with minimal dialogue to expose the conditions in which Soviet army recruits lived. The film explores themes of homoeroticism. Cast Vladimir Zamansky as The Unknown Man Armen Dzhigarkhanyan as Brigade Commander Oleg Vasilkov as Elin Roman Grekov as Zub Valeriy Troshin as Kudrin Aleksandr Chislov as Zyrin Mikhail Solomatin as Belikov Sergey Romantsov as Titarenko Sergey Bystritsky as Senior Lieutenant Elena Kondulainen as Death Oleg Khusainov as Angel Sergey Semyonov as Captain Maria Politseymako as woman in the field Vadim Piyankov as lance-corporal Reception Louis Menashe wrote in Cinéaste that "the harshness of Soviet basic training was legendary, outstripping other nations in that regard." Director Erkenov conveys those atrocities "mostly through a moody, elliptical, and often incomprehensibly enigmatic style; 100 Days is uneven; by turns haunting and edgy, and irritatingly obtuse, but powerful overall." Julian Graffy of Sight and Sound thought "the poetry of the film has a terrible bleakness; at its end there is no explanation, no atonement, not even any particular interest in the chain of death; instead, in a world drained of colour, light, air even, another dread day dawns." Derek Malcom of The Guardian observed that while the film is "clearly anti-military", it is more focused on "life's victims, and Erkenov's images bring them to life with stark elegance." Malcom points out that "there is very little screenplay and no plot to speak of; the film merely exists on the edge of a dark, humiliating and brutal abyss." He also highlighted that there are "copious homoerotic undertones", and although the movie "clearly has power and talent; what it lacks in the end is the drama of properly coherent story-telling." The Observer's film critic Philip French stated it is a "homoerotic film with a succession of often striking, dreamlike images, most frequently of naked soldiers in showers, steam baths, barrack-rooms and prison cells; images of humiliation and despair recur, but there is no coherent narrative; it looks rather like a funny thing that happened to Derek Jarman on the way to the Gulag." Eric Hansen wrote in Variety Magazine that "though technically poor and dramatically erratic, this metaphoric, slightly surrealistic look at life in the Russian military packs a punch." Overall, he concludes that "Erkenov succeeds in invoking a heady atmosphere and a meaty, homoerotic suggestiveness that lend a strange attraction to his characters piteous roads to self-destruction." See also LGBTQ List of Russian films List of LGBTQ-related films References Поляков Юрий https://books.google.com/books?id=-4d3QwAACAAJ&q=%D0%A1%D1%82%D0%BE+%D0%B4%D0%BD%D0%B5%D0%B9+%D0%B4%D0%BE+%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%B7%D0%B0 Сто дней до приказа 2009 АСТ 978-5-17-054344-1 ru Berlinale Archives 2019 Sto dnei do prikaza 100 Days Before the Command 100 Tage, Genosse Soldat https://www.berlinale.de/en/archive/jahresarchive/2019/02_programm_2019/02_filmdatenblatt_2019_201915782.html#tab=filmStills 18 December 2021 Berlin International Film Festival en French Philip Film: Splendour in the class School movies provide inspiration with an American Mr Chips and a nautical slant on Dead Poets Society The Observer 12 May 1996 12 Graffy Julian 100 Days Before the Command/Sto Dnei Do Prikaza Sight and Sound August 1996 6 8 59 Malcom Derek Screen: New releases: Drowning by numbers The Guardian 9 May 1996 T9 Menashe Louis 100 Days Before the Command Cinéaste March 2001 26 2 64 Menashe Louis https://books.google.com/books?id=S3u3b_U-c78C&dq=Yuri+Polyakov+100+days&pg=PA107 Moscow Believes in Tears: Russians and Their Movies 16 September 2014 New Academia Publishing, LLC 978-0-9845832-2-5 en Joint Publications Research Service Foreign Broadcast Information Service https://books.google.com/books?id=Ci9Ro5-5jhcC&q=Sto+dney+do+prikaza JPRS Report: Soviet Union. Military affairs 1989 The Service en Hansen Eric 14 March 1994 Sto Dney Do Prikaza https://variety.com/1994/film/reviews/sto-dney-do-prikaza-1200436297/ 18 December 2021 Variety en-US External links 0100694 100 Days Before the Command at the Internet Archive 100 Days Before the Command at Filmaffinity Category:1990 drama films Category:1990 LGBTQ-related films Category:1990 films Category:Gorky Film Studio films Category:Soviet drama films Category:Russian-language drama films Category:Soviet LGBTQ-related films Category:Russian LGBTQ-related films Category:1990s LGBTQ-related drama films Category:Military of Russia in films Category:Films about military personnel Category:1990 Soviet films Category:1990 Russian-language films