I roam the middle of the night to find the light again

For weeks I have been having the kind of nightmares from which I wake nauseated and with my head aching, which is on one level par for the course and on another a bad sign even for me. Last night, however, I dreamed of watching a famous war film from the late 1960's or '70's; its writer-director and milieu were Russian, although the film itself was in French, which in the dream I did not question and awake I wish the director existed so I could look her life story up. Among other things, I can't remember if the film was supposed to be partly autobiographical: it concerned a partisan unit operating in Belarus or Ukraine which had aggregated out of a roving band of war orphans, so that no one was older than nineteen and the effect was as much Wild Boys of the Road (1933) as it was Ivan's Childhood (1962) or Come and See (1985). The core had been a pair of siblings who got out of their village when no one else did. One was the leader now and the other was dead. About fifteen of them are alive at the start of the movie, all of them looking terribly young and self-sufficient as M1891/30s; some are girls, some are Jews, most of them are sleeping together one way or another and one of them doesn't sleep with anyone. They are fiercely protective of one another, they'll work with more adult or more official detachments but not join them—to outsiders, they all give the same last name. (The subtitles didn't translate it, but it was the word for alder tree. I don't know if my brain remembered while I was asleep that alder turns red when cut, as bright as bloodstains. It was never explained.) I remember the tone being simultaneously grimy-realist and stylized, with peculiar, theatrical flashforwards of papers being filed in a drab government office that seemed to have nothing to do with the events of the main narrative. The plot drifted until it jolted, full of shared histories and memories, their communal ritual of telling one another's stories as if they'd all lived them; atrocities were shot from the same slight remove as adolescent makeouts. The most conventional action sequence came somewhere in the second act, when the alders successfully blew up a German tank. What I remember most vividly is the final scene, everyone briefly and rarely out in the open around the same fire, drinking, celebrating something minor but vital as everything is when you are literally fighting for your lives, and the girl who doesn't sleep with anyone comes over to the boy who in a timeline with classes instead of dugouts and sniping and sabotage would have been the class clown and puts her arms around him, which is unusual enough that he stops telling his dirty joke for a moment but not so weird that he isn't still drinking as she rocks him and murmurs into his ear, "You won't remember this. You're fifteen years old, and you're drunk, and everyone still calls you Berlin." (He could read and speak German.) "I'll remember when they don't. You'll remember the rest for me," at which point it became clear that the film was her recollection of the war and her figure in the action was not the sixteen-year-old in the real time of 1943 but the memory-projection of the middle-aged woman who becomes visible only in the last frames of the government office, looking at the papers that document so scantly, incompletely, and in some cases wildly inaccurately the lives of these people who were her comrades and her siblings and her lovers she didn't make love with. And then, because the movie was over, I woke up.

Happy solstice!