100 Days Before the Command

Customer Reviews:

Naked Boyhood At It's Best........2007-01-20

If you're fed up with typical American prudishness concerning the body, and are tired of "American pie" films this movie is for you. Though in many aspects surreal without a plot, you get to delve into the world of Russian army soldiers who are relaxed and comfortable being naked with each other. No sexual hype is intimated, as they spend time in the shower room being relaxed, with the exception of one soldier telling the other in Russian, "stop oggling at me!" With this film on the American market, we are well on our way, in this country, to being relaxed about casual nudity in films.

A documentary snapshot of Russian military life.......2006-11-14

Some may be looking for deep symbolism in "100 Days".
One reviewer called it surreal.

It is very realistic actually, almost a documentary
about a real problem in Soviet and Russian society:
low morale and brutal treatment of recruits in an
Army dogged by a failed war in Afghanistan and the
collapse of the Soviet Union. To this day today's
Russian military has faced accusations of atrocities
committed in Grozny, Chechnya, which had been
tragic for both Russians and Chechens.

There have been Red Army scandals involving the
deaths of young men at the hands of criminally
sadistic officers and NCOs. Drug abuse, alcohol
and even male prostitution have been known to occur
on Army bases.

In one incident, commanding officers got recruits
to perform sexual services for a third party while
the officers took payment. There have been rapes
and desertion and suicide is not any surprising
event.

Just to escape the stultifying army environment,
recruits had been known to get high off their
boot polish. Many have gone blind from such
dangerous activity.

Viewers of "100 Days" who attempt to make sense of
all the nudity and strange broken down landscape
shouldn't trouble themselves too much. Such places
and activities literally did exist and were not such
uncommon sites around 1990.

The boys rubbing eachother down nude is not just
some bizarre symbolism. Men of all ages did and
still do rub eachother down in the age old Russian
tradition of the "Banya" or communal bath and sauna.
To some Westerners it may look "gay" but it really
is a traditional Russian cultural phenomenon.

The broken down, abandoned looking landscape was
not a surreal movie set designed for effect. Soviet
army bases were horribly dilapidated as much of Soviet
society was at the point of collapse.

The translations are indeed peculiar as one review points
out.

The original Russian title "Sto Dnej Do Prikaza" should
actually be translated as "A Hundred Days 'Til Orders Arrive"
(i.e. Orders to get discharged or move on to another
place)

The producers maybe should have prefaced the film with some
background on Soviet/Russian society and culture back in 1990
so the realistic episodes of the film would not seem meaningless
and "surreal."

"Why are you goggling at me?".......2006-07-04

The Soviet film "100 Days Before the Command" is the tale of the fate of a handful of raw young recruits who attempt to retain their humanity in a bleak, senseless, brutal militaristic culture. The film blends moments of brutality--a drunken officer returning at night and urinating on the face of a sleeping recruit, for example--with endless nude scenes. The director, Hussein Erkenov, states that the inclusion of nudity was a deliberate action aimed to show the recruits' vulnerability and innocence. Well, I can buy that, I suppose--the naked shower scenes, the sprawled, tangled half-naked bodies in the abandoned woodshed, and the prolonged soapy rub-downs etc do invoke a certain ethereal 'lost boys' quality (think Hylas and the Nymphs--but the nymphs are all male). However, after wrestling with the possibility that perhaps this film wasn't set in a basic training camp for recruits after all, but instead was perhaps a nudist colony, I was still left with a dull feature, sparse dialogue and quixotic editing. In Russian with English subtitles--displacedhuman

Picturesque DVD's make nice beverage coasters...........2006-03-23

This is one creative way in which to recoup some of the loss incurred by buying this nightmare. If you are one of the unfortunate who rent this waste of time(like I was) recommend that your local video store make one empty space on their shelves and toss this loser. This 71 minute "experience", which feels more like 100 Days of Viewing Hell, is nothing more then a montage of artsy, disjoined, surreal scenes. It quickly becomes boring after the first 5 minutes, tedious after 10 minutes, and downright irritating at around 15 minutes. I actually made the mistake of suffering through to the end, hoping that something magical would happen to make everything half-way understandable. This film could only appeal to the rare, artistically elite, filmgoer who finds anything as superficial as character development or cumbersome as plot layout simply uninspiring.

Male Nudity in all Honesty and Naturalness.......2005-08-09

It's always wonderful to see European films that portray nakedness in a natural, non-pornographic setting; what a refresher from the average "American-Pie" films which I find phony. Furthermore, I myself am a Slavic person (born in the US)so I felt right at home with the movie, even though Communist oppression has never been conducive to the sensitive human spirit which is very much candidly seen in the young faces and eyes of the young boys in the film. It's also very refreshing to view a film where young boys are comfortable being naked with each other, without all the sexual shallowness very much associated with nudity in many other films. Watching this movie made me feel good and at home. It's only a shame that this film did not have a concise plot; it was a little on the messy and surreal side.

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