IIRC Donbass was not available anywhere on streaming when MelesMeles made that post last year.
Let me see if it is now.
Hey nice! It’s on Kanopy!
I tried watching Donbass this morning. I really enjoyed the first sequence, a bunch of crisis actors running into a warzone was hilarious. But then the movie lost me. But I kept watching despite not really understanding for the next hour. There’s still 45 minutes left but I don’t think I’ll go back for the rest. It just feels like a series of disconnected skits, not a movie.
Well, yes, but you didn’t get to the ending! That’s one of the hazards of talking about a movie before you’ve seen it. The structure of Donbass is very intentional and very much the point. : )
Also, I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending, but there’s a lot of cultural context in Donbass that might not be coming across. The distinctions among languages and ethnicities, the subtext of that wedding scene, the way soldiers react to journalists, and so forth. It’s all very much about the tension and competing worldviews between Ukraine and Russia, and it’s all laid out with almost no exposition.
For instance, the “skit” with the checkpoints is basically a straight-up comedy in terms of structure, but there’s nothing humorous about it; it’s absurdism at its blackest and, the film wants you to understand, a reality on the ground. So to some people watching, the “checkpoint skit” might seem like a nonsensical Monty Python segment. But I also feel like it’s a powerful representation of what Russia is doing in Ukraine, a tightly distilled narrative “metaphor”, perhaps.
As a film, Donbass is constructed from these distilled narratives, but they’re by no means discrete, as the movie will make clear once you’ve seen it. :)
No no, that’s precisely why I don’t feel like I’m equipped to understand this movie. No condescension required, I freely admit it and am frustrated by it.
If it’s a chore, don’t push it. It’s perfectly acceptable if it doesn’t work for you. But if you’re curious about what I was spoilering in terms of the structure, here’s what I was referencing: the story kind of folds in on itself in a few places, such as with the wedding “guests” leaving the ceremony to set up the artillery salvo that kills the journalists; and it all comes full circle with the crisis actors themselves being slaughtered and left as the next atrocity to be discovered.
It’s really grim stuff, and part of what makes it so grim is precisely how it’s structured like sketch comedy. But these are the scenes that have been running on a loop in Ukraine for nearly ten years now. The “full scale invasion” didn’t change things so much as solidify them. I feel Donbass, the film, became even more relevant, not less.
Donbass
This is a bitter black comedy told through a series of vignettes that are all as sour as lemons. It paints a picture of corruption, cruelty and survival in a broken society at war*.
The comedy is cold and mirthless, only funny by virtue of absurdity. There are no easy laughs, if anything they’re downright painful, but it adds a lot of poignancy and weight to the movie. It had me laughing on the outside as I was crying on the inside. I really enjoyed it.
*It takes place pre-invasion, but it’s still extremely relevant
Yeah, these things are way too complicated to be left to film critics.
I did finish the movie. My opinion stands! Bringing back the starting characters was good. The wedding was interesting in that it just kept going and going and going.
With regards to your spoiler Tom: Thanks, I didn’t catch those connections. For instance I didn’t catch that the journalists were brought back or the wedding guests.
I had also missed out on the connection between the vignettes, although it didn’t make it a lesser movie for me at all. I guess Donbass is due for a rewatch!
One of the things I’ve been thinking about after watching it is how little we really understood of Ukraine before the invasion. This stuff was already happening, to the point where Sergei Loznitsa was able to make his own great satire about it, and it kinda bothers me that I had no idea before it became the headline it is for us today.
I watched this after the invasion, and I wonder how I would’ve felt about it if I had seen it before. Maybe it would’ve seemed shrill or over the top. Today, with everything we know, we recognize the cruel reality in those skits.
I love how harsh it is, and how conflicted it makes me. It somehow manages to be equally funny and sad at the same time. It’s great art, right?
The only character we see who is from the Ukraine side of the conflict is the “assassin” who is put at the bus stop for people to harass right?
Everyone else in the movie is either a civilian or journalist or from the Pro-Russian side.
I wouldn’t know, but I do feel it’s capital “I” Important entertainment. :)
(I try to avoid “is it art?” discussions, because those depend on people’s personal definitions.)
But as entertainment, I feel it’s special in that it cleverly and starkly shines a light on something terrible happening in the world, and it does it in a way that makes you engage with the terrible thing in a way completely different from someone just relating the terrible thing. It’s very much about showing you the absurdity of the situation and insidiously effective Russian tactics to destroy Ukraine, and showing it to you from a dozen different angles, sometimes with very little explanation.
I don’t think it’s quite that easy, @Rock8man, and you’re touching on what makes the conflict so hard for us to understand in the US and much of Europe. We think of wars as people fighting each other from different sides of a border, but the situation in eastern Ukraine ignores borders, even prior to the 2022 invasion.
For instance, the early sequence where the young woman is trying to get the old woman to leave the shelter. They’re both Ukrainian, presumably, but the young woman’s boyfriend or husband is a well-to-do Russian, and she’s trying to extract her mother to come live with them, but the mother would rather stay in the cramped shelter than live under a Russian’s roof. If I recall correctly, none of this is explained. You have to infer it from context and what you know about the situation. But the point is they’re both Ukrainian, even if the daughter is now in the Russian “sphere”.
Those are the kinds of nuances throughout Donbass, which shows a wide spread of victims and perpetrators. Thanks for sticking with it! And if you have any other questions or comments, I’d love to hear them.
Oh yes! You’re right, put those people in the bunker in the Pro-Ukranian column, you’re right.
It was a wonderful contrast, that horrible bunker and this fully make-up clad glam lady walking in there.
The crowd scene around the bus stop was interesting too, just to show how a mob mentality kind of changes people, in real time. As they start harrassing the Ukrainian soldier a little bit at first, and then the old lady lights the fire and as you get more and more people that anger starts feeding on itself.