From Ukraine during the Donbas conflict (the current war not yet started), a well-received directing debut for writer Natalya Vorozhbit in this portmanteau film of four lightly interlocked stories. The promising opening a 'three-hander' absurdist miniature at a military checkpoint where a high school headmaster, weary, tipsy, out of it, gets a routine stop by the bored soldier on duty whose trigger-finger perks up due to the driver’s slow responses and missing I.D. or driver’s license. (He mistakenly took his wife’s passport instead of his own.) General suspicions & nerves threaten to escalate into something more serious when the grunt calls his superior officer for help. The driver suggests calling his wife (or a military acquaintance) to vouch for him, while the officer does a slow burn worthy of Laurel & Hardy. (Or is this more Samuel Beckett territory?) Using mostly long, still takes, Vorozhbit has everyone play their cards close to the vest, which works equally well on the next story (without the comic undertone) as three girls (one of them possibly a student at the headmaster’s school) debate boys, sex & cigarettes in wartime before the youngest girl is met by her anxious grandmother. This too is excellent, beautifully caught and cast; it’s the last two stories that drop the ball. The third, longest of the four, takes us thru the brutalization (psychological/sexual) of an all but imprisoned girl near the front, more or less tortured by a Russian soldier with a nihilistic bent. She, at times, seems to be getting off at the mistreatment. But after a long night, she’s woken in the abandoned warehouse she’s been confined to, by a decent young Ukrainian soldier whose gentler manner only brings out the beast in this degraded woman. Compare with her younger self as seen in the fourth story as she tries to make things right after accidentally running over some farm family’s chicken only to be taken to the cleaners by these wily rurals. The last two stories as deterministic as the first two felt spontaneous, though technically they all have impressive things in them. Hopefully. Vorozhbit’s recently wrapped second feature (currently titled DEMONS) will expand on her better instincts.
WATCH THIS, NOT THAT/LINK: For a better look at Ukraine at war (putatively made in 2019), try ATLANTIS. https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2023/07/atlantis-2019.html
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