Donbass: Conspiracies, event actors, antifa, fake news... all mordantly played out in Russian and Ukrainian

By Jim Slotek

Rating: B-plus

If you have eclectic friends who’ve “cut the cable” recently, they may have graduated past the Netflixes, Primes and Craves for more specialized streaming. 

One such interesting platform is Film Movement Plus, dedicated to world cinema and festival gems like Sergey Loznitsa’s Donbass, a sardonic drama set amid the chaotic occupation and propagandized atmosphere of occupied Eastern Ukraine (or Novorossiya, “New Russia” as some would have it). The film – which debuts on FMP Friday, November 20 - won Loznitsa an Un Certain Regard director’s award at Cannes in 2018.

Newlyweds Ivan and Angela praise “New Russia” at their ceremony in Donbass.

What may surprise is how relatable the film is to our own situation, with its subplots of conspiracy, “anti-fascists,” fake news, event actors and utterly malleable conceptions of reality.

The complexity of the benighted nation of Ukraine is such that both U.S. Republicans and Democrats have exploited it as a political football. Few who’ve invoked the place to make a political point know much about it.

And Loznitsa is not there to hold anyone’s hand and teach them. His mission is suspicion of what is presented as reality. The movie opens in a film makeup trailer, where actors preparing for their roles argue and insult each other before being led out into the street as a bomb goes off. Soon we see them being interviewed by scripted “press” about this terrorist act by agents of the ostensibly fascist Ukrainian national government.

It is the first in a series of portmanteau episodes ranging from dark, garish comedy to stomach-turning acts of violence. In the next episode, we see a corpulent official of the new government (Boris Kamorzin) re-opening a maternity hospital and “showing” the locals how much food, medicine and even chocolate bars had been hoarded by the Ukrainian government administrator before their liberation. After the show is over, we see him being handed an envelope of cash by the new head physician (Evgeny Chepurnyak).

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

The lesson, before the movie is even 20 minutes old, truth is what we say it is. The message is punctuated by a scene at a town meeting where an outraged woman (Lyudmila Smorodina) pours a bucket of excrement over the head of an official, screaming about a fake news story that accused her of stealing public money.

It should be noted the latter scene is in Ukrainian (a language I know a little). Much of the movie is in Russian, which makes sense since Eastern Ukraine is heavily Russified. But the subtitles make no distinction. It would have helped put the characters and their sensibilities in context if those subtitles had said which language was being spoken at a given time.

The vignettes may seem random, a captured Ukrainian soldier, accused of being a fascist “exterminator,” is tied to a post in the town square to be violently set upon by locals. An elderly woman living in a squalid bomb shelter refuses to be “rescued” by her daughter who lives comfortably in New Russia. A young father (Alexander Zamuraev) is given a no-choice “request “from the local military to hand over his car for the fight against fascism. A German journalist (Thorsten Merten) is accused by soldiers of being a fascist because, well, he’s German.

But by the time we get to the garish, almost Fellini-esque wedding of “Mr. and Mrs. Fried Egg” (Sergey Kolesov and Svetlana Kolesova), in which the drunken celebrants sing an anthem for Novorossiya, we see where the erasure of truth and the relentlessness of propaganda has taken us.

The Belarus-born Loznitsa, now a Ukrainian citizen, is not a follower of the “brevity is the soul of wit” school of dark humour. Each vignette is almost too long to earn that descriptor, almost as if he doesn’t want to let go of a scene until the viewer is utterly uncomfortable.

But that churn builds on itself, taking us by the last act to a dark and cynical place.

Donbass. Written and directed by Sergey Loznitsa. Starring Boris Kamorzin, Alexander Zamuraev and Svetlana Kolesova. Debuts Friday, November 20 on  Film Movement Plus.