Sergei Loznitsa’s episodic Donbass, now enjoying a belated U.S. release, doesn’t quite cohere into a story compelling enough to offset its stifling bleakness.
Sergei Loznitsa’s episodic Donbass, now enjoying a belated U.S. release, doesn’t quite cohere into a story compelling enough to offset its stifling bleakness.
N ever fear, Ukraine: American independent-film exhibitors are coming to your aid.
In New York City, both the IFC Cinema in Greenwich Village and the Museum of the Moving Image have been featuring Ukrainian films to support the besieged country.
One of the most prominent Ukrainian filmmakers, Sergei Loznitsa, is finally seeing the American rollout of his Donbass, which won a prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival but has never previously been released in the U.S. It’s not hard to figure out why: The film is a dry, austere slog. Loznitsa’s signature style is chilly to Arctic. Without offering much in the way of meaningful dialogue, he takes a fly-on-the-wall approach, parking his camera for long, static takes in which whole minutes can tick by without much happening. And when something does happen — such as an unexpected mass murder late in the movie — the writer–director leaves the viewer to do most of the work of making sense of it. Donbass is being billed as a dark satire, but it’s more like a plotless, Robert Altman-esque series of documentary-style vignettes, in which a subsidiary character from each segment becomes the focus of the next until the string works its way back to the beginning.
You may not have heard of the Donbass region of Ukraine before Vladimir Putin invaded it, but the area has been the site of a civil war since 2014, with constant violence and several regions under control of Russia-allied separatists who have declared independent “people’s republics” and refer to the areas they control by force as “Novorossiya,” or “New Russia.” The film does shed light on Putin’s rhetoric: That its Russian and Russophile elements keep referring to the Ukrainians allied to the government in Kyiv as “fascists” demonstrates that Putin’s nutty talk about Russia’s need to “liberate” Russia-loving regions from the rest of the supposedly far-right Ukraine long predated the current Russian invasion.
Several sequences of the film leave the viewer to puzzle over the dramatic implications, such as when Loznitsa takes us on a grim journey through a moldy, depressing, subterranean bomb shelter that looks like a relic of the 1940s, and we’re left to surmise that the people therein are Ukrainians whose village is under attack by Russia’s allies. When a glamorous-looking woman incongruously appears in the building to try to coax her aged mother out of it with offers of comfortable lodging and other enticements, the old woman adamantly refuses. We don’t find out why until the next scene, when the younger woman reports to her office, which is in a building occupied by the Novorossiya forces: She’s a collaborator.
Loznitsa’s most sharply drawn and hence most effective scene comes late in the film, in a Kafkaesque encounter at a former primary school that is now a military HQ for the pro-Russian forces. A hapless man who is late to pick up his child at kindergarten tries to claim his car, which has been reported stolen, but instead he is ordered to sign a declaration that he is willingly turning the car over to the Russian-allied soldiers. When he reacts with disbelief, he is detained and told to start calling his friends to raise $100,000 if he wants to be released. The gruesome kicker comes when he is ushered into a roomful of similarly bewildered men, each of them wandering around begging friends for ransom money on his cellphone.
That scene typifies Donbass, a film in which oppression works in ways that are bleak and strange but also very easy to believe. If other scenes had similarly built to a major dramatic payoff, the effect would be brilliant. Instead, unfortunately, most of the episodes trickle off without resolution, and we are left with a series of snapshots rather than a story. The banality, brutality, and arbitrariness of war come through clearly enough, but these themes have earned richer treatment many times before. And while the juxtaposition of the quotidian with the horrible adds some bite, it’s not enough to overcome the general aura of inescapable bleakness.
