After a five-minute one-shot prologue (four soldiers finish off and bury a wounded enemy sniper), distanced by heat-capture surveillance imagery but still pretty grim stuff, Valentyn Vasyanovych’s award-winning Ukrainian film cuts to a barren landscape and this startling graphic: 2025 EASTERN UKRAINE one year after the war. It sets up a quotidian look at how even wars won leave a terrible residue (physical/psychological) of aftereffects on land & participants (soldiers, volunteers, civilians). Often played in static one-shot takes, though moving the camera when that’s called for, we begin by following two vets unable to adjust to post-war life. One won’t make it. The other joins an outfit working to deactivate military ordnance (especially mines) and to find, identify and properly bag, tag & bury corpses in various states of decomposition. In the film’s most memorable scene, a static one-take wonder of a shot, the volunteer converts the ‘mouth’ of a damaged earth digger into an improvised bathtub. It's followed by a disturbing return to an early scene of target practice, now reconfigured into a shadow play. Hard as this sounds to watch, it’s also compelling and deeply humanistic. There’s even a bit of personal hope for the volunteer with the woman who recruited him, though probably none for the contaminated land they are working. The final shot, with a return to heat imagery, intensely moving. It brings you back to that opening date:: 2025 EASTERN UKRAINE one year after the war.
DOUBLE-BILL/LINK: Not a real match, but Miklós Jancsó’s nihilistic war film classic CSILLAGOSOK, KATONAK / THE RED AND THE WHITE/’68 lines up with this film. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2011/01/csillagosok-katonak-red-and-white-1968.html
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