Review of Terry Loan’s film “The Last Rifleman”

Terry Loan’s film “The Last Rifleman” is in theaters. According to Mikhail Trofimenkov, the ballad about the last Irish veteran of the Normandy landings in June 1944 was created according to the canons of socialist sentimentalism. Dignified, moderately harsh, moderately tear-jerking and not exactly boring, but completely predictable.

Seventy-year-old Pierce Brosnan, a man in his prime, heroically surrendered himself to the hands of ruthless make-up artists to transform into 92-year-old Artie Crawford, a resident of a nursing home in the cozy Irish countryside. Makeup is makeup, but you can’t take away the charisma, and Brosnan’s character looks at most eighty-five and not a second more.

The house, despite all the surrounding goodness, is run by ladies with Gestapo habits, capable of confiscating the mobile phone from Artie’s only friend. When Maggie, Artie’s wife for 68 years, who shared a room with him in the shelter, quietly departs to the best of worlds, nothing can stop the hero from returning to the past. Which is equivalent, obviously, to a journey into death.

Maggie’s departure coincides with Normandy’s celebration of the 75th anniversary of D-Day, the opening of a second front in Europe by the Allied landings in Normandy. Artie is eager to return to where, at the age of 17, he experienced the horror of death, was seriously wounded, and lost his best friend Charlie. But who will release him from a comfortable prison? And here Loan cleverly dilutes the mournful pathos of the opening with humor in the genre of “but the old man is still wow.”

Artie escapes from the shelter in a laundry car, but cannot get to the blood-stained beaches of Normandy. Then he is late for the train that should take him to the ferry. Then the bus breaks down, on which he can still make it to the port. Then – at the decisive moment, at the border control – it turns out that his passport has been expired for 17 years. In addition, among the veteran’s rich bouquet of illnesses is diabetes, due to which he loses consciousness from time to time.

But the world is kind and beautiful. Artie will come across bad people – young punks – only once on his thorny path. Everyone else is generous to the point of unbearability. And the taxi driver who dispersed the punks and took Artie to his destination for free. And the brutal truck driver who saved the hero’s life with a can of Coca-Cola. And a French woman with cancer, skillfully deceiving the customs of two countries for Artie’s sake. And, quite surrealistically, a young fan of Ennio Morricone takes the old man under his wing after learning that he once shook hands with the maestro himself in Verona.

Everything seemed to be for the best in the best of all worlds. But something is wrong with collective memory. An elderly taxi driver imagines the nightmare of the Normandy landings only from Saving Private Ryan. An ambitious journalist, who decided to make a sensational report about Artie’s odyssey, is stunned by the sight of a military cemetery in Normandy: did so many people die? Well, the journalist could have been more educated.

And celebrations don’t bring much joy. First of all, because there are no celebrations. Of course, somewhere behind the scenes, all sorts of different presidents are spouting pathetic speeches. But in the Norman town where Artie finds himself, only masked reenactors are rummaging around in the corners and wax figures of Marines are grinning angrily.

And only three dubious joys remain for Artie.

Shake hands with a surprisingly youthful veteran of the SS tank division. To shake, mind you, perhaps to forgive, but in no case to understand. They say, you are scoundrels, but okay, it’s a thing of the past.

Meet with a black veteran of American air defense to sadly state: they are the last fighters of their units left. Well, let’s give it one last shot of good whiskey.

And finally, visit the military cemetery where Charlie lies, and dump on the audience’s heads a crowd of “skeletons” lurking in his memory, which the audience of this unpretentious but worthy film guessed about from its very first frames.