To see the Sun through troubled water...

To create on the screen the person who exists absolutely really in this world, it's necessary to make him pass through yourself... To feel and to remember... really remember how he was in his childhood... his grandmothers and grandfathers... his mother and father... all his numerous relatives and friends... starting from his first days and steps... to realize if he scuffled in his childhood and for what reasons... what he liked and what he didn't... It seems that Michael does it precisely in such a way when he works... If not, how then arises this irresistible desire to know as mush as possible about every hero impersonated by him... much more as the time restricted with screen frames allows... to pass, together with him, step by step, through the life up to the day of acquaintance and to meet him as he has become now...

You can find just few lines in Wikipedia and IMDB about the youth serial "Hearts and Bones", which was made at the BBC television... The sources are also in variance which film exactly: this one or "Band of Brothers" has been made before, and, therefore, has had the time to outride the other one on the screens and to become Michael's debut as an actor... The official variant of "Hearts and Bones" issued on DVD has been cut so much as it was whatsoever possible to do that, to preserve the sense of the film in general and the consequence of the events in particular...

We will face these hands-scissors not once, without any hope to get the answer from their owners to the question about the reasons for such barbaric cuts-in-shots-and-times...

Michael himself in his interviews never mentions this role, considering it either too small or too old to arouse somebody's interest... We don't know why it happened, and all the same, we couldn't make up out minds to the fact that Hermann has been finally and definitely buried in oblivion... That's why we tried to restore, "step by step", that which has been thrown away by the "cutters" and editors who accompanied that deed with the phrase gorgeous in its impenetrability: "Good bye, junk!.."

We have to apologize beforehand for the quality of the shots representing the "steps" of the first episodes... Unfortunately, we couldn't find anything more acceptable... As we were not lucky in seeing or knowing how met Ginger Spice named Sinead and a young German Hermann who has wilfully run away from the army to have a quick vacation in London... And besides that, we can't free ourselves from the sense that the character of the young man who appears for the first time in the third part of the film, slightly differs by its significance and depth from that we meet in the fifth and sixth episodes...

Probably, it’s no wonder... sometimes it happens in the world... The circumstances change us beyond recognition forcing us to become more adult and wise under the influence of experience, for some reason, mostly not very vivacious... Who knows, what had happened in Hermann's life in that period there, offscreen... The echoes of the first grieves and disappointments can be heard already in the first talk with Sinead...

"If you were living such a life as I do, you would think that there is nothing... nothing new in the world..." and, while listening to the Hermann's voice, looking at his precocious eyes, you understand that it's neither bragging to a girl with the gained experience, nor braving with the bygone life sinuosity, but earnest disappointments which he had to plunge ahead into, and which are anything but easy to grapple with as it may seem at the first sight... possibly, above his strengths yet...

Near amusing and reckless enthrallment with diving and readiness to start immediate explorations of the bottom of the Thames, suddenly, a figure of completely sole man appears on the screen, which has hidden his perplexity and anxious expectation beyond the swimming mask... You can hear the strange tenderness in his low voice, shyly asking a question: "Do you love me, Ginger Spice?... at least a bit... You may lie if you want..."

Sudden dependence on the choice of his girlfriend... nakedness in front of her decision and sincere thirst of an ordinary faith and love...
It's most difficult to impersonate, it seems, the very common emotions...
you are not allowed to cry...
you should not sob and rage...
there's no necessity to make a shapeless mess out of the enemy's face and to stand up immediately after the blow with a jack hammer on the head...
there's nothing like that...
It's just the heart of man who watches Hermann at that moment starts beating a bit quicker...
A dishevelled bird, not warmed up with somebody's tenderness, sitting on the parapet over the black water...
"Yes... I love you..."
"Ginger Spice loves me!"
It's interesting what Hermann is thinking at that moment about "there's nothing... nothing new on this world"? Most likely, while embracing and kissing Sinead, he merely think of nothing...

The flippers are accurately packed into a rucksack... the object symbolizing an inviolable devotion to the internal liberty which you can't forget about... which you can't be betray... it's time to go to the world of square-bashing and slave-driving...
"What would they do to you when you get back?"
"Shout. Step a feet. Make me step my feet. Step a feet again. Have another shout..."
Sinead and her friends Amanda and Michael don't want so much that he goes away... as we don't...
And if the wish to leave him quite near can’t be realized, at least ask somebody there, above, that he would come back...
And he comes back...
Comes back having finally left the hateful soldiering and having got the job in one of the courier services in London...
He made that to remain with Sinead already forever...

It seems there’s nothing to say... But through all the simplicity of the circumstances and prosiness of goals, this fellow effervesces with a beam of real hedonism... with the capacity to take this world "as it is"... to love and to do... day by day... as commonly as to breathe... but, if everything is so common, then why the most people have never learned this art of living...
A bottle of beer in the company of friends...
Well-done work...
Warm breasts and tender lips of the girlfriend...
The joy that you yourself can earn to buy what is necessary for you...
A breakfast for your beloved made with your own hands...
Happy expectation of the baby which Amanda is giving birth to just now... in the next room...
Absence of fear in front of any trials of life...
The aspiration to accept another person without "adjusting" him to yourself...
The skill "to see the Sun through troubled water"...
The experience of a normal human life through your own bruises, offences, cold of waters and smudgy hands...
The wish to make your chosen one so happy, as nobody, even the best "Misters Darcy", won’t be able to...
Not on the pages of endless books with the favourite refined heroes, but here and now... as only he, Hermann, can...
That’s so easy!.. Oho... have you ever tried?..
And if you could do absolutely nothing, then "what’s the point?"..
Tili-tili dough... grooms... brides...
Bride and groom tili-tili dough...

Oh, yes... please take note that that’s not our "bad English"...
It’s just we kept all German “incorrectnesses” and Hermann’s verbal mistakes in the slogans to the film fragments...