A wartime trio pulls together for survival

A film about three people stranded at the crossroads of life and death during wartime, the Russian film “The Cuckoo” opens with a group of World War II soldiers chaining a man to a rock. Without explanation, the Finnish regulars have sentenced the would-be Sisyphus, a sniper, to perish amid the wild beauty of Lapland. Resourceful as an Eagle Scout and nearly as young, the sniper instead frees himself with some tree sap, a dollop of spit and his reading glasses, whereupon he wiggles out of one predicament and straight into another.

Caught between a proverbial rock and a hard place -- in this case, starving to death in the surrounding forest -- the Finn, Veiko (Ville Haapasalo), ends up in the company of a Lapp woman, Anni (Anni-Kristiina Juuso), and the wounded Russian officer she’s nursing back to health. The Russian, a captain called Ivan (Victor Bychkov) accused of treason, had been on his way to prison or worse when his convoy came under friendly fire. Anni, who had smelled death seeping into her local river, found Ivan on the bank and dragged him back to her hut where she stripped him and fed him a holistic smoothie of reindeer’s milk and blood. But where there were only two in the hut there are now three, a combustible number even in paradise.

Written and directed by Alexander Rogozhkin, a Russian whose work has begun making the rounds on the international festival circuit, “The Cuckoo” is a rare bird indeed -- a disarming, appealingly modest discovery, beautifully shot, nicely performed. Perched on the knife’s edge of absurdity, the story at once embraces the large questions (who is the enemy and why) and shrugs them off with a laugh (it’s hard to take the enemy seriously when he’s all but naked). Against a spectacular natural backdrop on the lip of a peninsula, Veiko bounds around Anni and Ivan, as eager and good-natured as a Labrador retriever. In long, unbroken sentences, he reveals his history, his philosophy and a student’s love of great books, endearing himself to the woman if not the man.

Yet no matter how much he talks, the Finn can’t get his meaning across because none of the three, each a refugee from a different world, can literally understand what the other is saying -- when one says no another hears yes while the third hears something else entirely. And still Veiko tries. Solicitous to Anni, he responds to her needs with enthusiasm and anxiously tries to connect with the Russian, who’s taken him for a fascist. As Veiko lunges and Ivan parries, Anni goes about the hard business of everyday life, trapping fish and gathering firewood for the coming winter. In this wilderness where survival is the only fight that matters, and in the company of this woman, the world’s madness seems increasingly immaterial.

A sly pacifist fable, “The Cuckoo” suggests that men cling to war to give themselves a reason for being; a solider without an army is also a man and a man without an army needs something to do. Anni knows this but it takes her companions time to catch up to speed. Veiko clutches at peace and tries to persuade Ivan that he’s a citizen of the civilized world by invoking Dostoevsky. For Ivan, whose dissidence against the Soviet state and hatred of fascism have put him between his own rock and hard place, the Finn proves to be an irritant, a puzzle and, finally, a moral dilemma. It is, Ivan discovers, exceedingly tough to hate a man who builds you a sauna.

*

‘The Cuckoo’

MPAA rating: PG-13, for sexual content and violence

Times guidelines: Male nudity, some gunplay, a scene of a reindeer being bled (it lives).

Ville Haapasalo...Veiko

Viktor Bychkov...Ivan

Anni-Kristiina Juuso...Anni

A Sony Pictures Classics release. Director-writer Alexander Rogozhkin. Producer Sergei Selyanov. Cinematographer Andrei Zhegalov. Production designer Vladimir Svetozarov. Music Dmitry Pavlov. Editor Julia Roumyantseva. Sound Anatoly Goudkovsky, Sergey Sokolov. Costume designer Marina Nikolaeva. Makeup Olga Shamkovitch. In Russian, Finnish and Sami (Lapp) with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour, 44 minutes.

At Landmark’s Westside Pavilion Cinemas, Westside Pavilion, 10800 West Pico Blvd., (310) 475-0202, and Laemmle’s Pasadena Playhouse, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, (626) 844-6500.