Review: Bucha
Annihilating Distance
A review of Bucha by Volodymyr Chernyshev
Every film is an enriched piece of literature, and all literature is a grandiose act of myth-making. The fairy tale—exalted sublimation of existence, a poetic rendering of reality—is primarily distinguished by the particularity of its message; it is specificity that fuels the emphatic dialectic we so cherish in this art form. And, of course, such particularity is unattainable without distance.
The trailer for Bucha, a pompous blockbuster centered on Kazakhstani Konstantin Gudauskus, who evacuated people from the eponymous and recently occupied city, was unveiled six months after the world recoiled from that massacre. The act of opportunistic exploitation of a tragedy, whilst the bones of the victims still radiate heat, shatters the domino tile, starting a chain sequence of disasters. This disregard for boundaries—that sacred distance—triggers a cascade of immoral motifs that permeates the film.
The drama begins in a Kazakhstani detention center, where a prosecutor—bafflingly speaking Ukrainian—levels unspecified charges at the protagonist. After several tawdry moments the scene shifts to a Ukraine on the cusp of war. Konstantin (Cezary Łuszkiewicz), gazing out upon a vista of weary constructivism with a plastic countenance. His constitution perfectly endures a grating parody of scores akin to those by Hildur Guðnadóttir or Hans Zimmer—a tune that drones on till the film’s end. Soon, a chorus of political voices swells the audio track, deepening the sense of derivativeness.
In the manner of a third-rate spy thriller, a mysterious figure named Haide tasks the protagonist with evacuating the family of a Ukrainian military official from Russian-controlled territory. Given Konstantin’s Kazakhstani citizenship—a nation amicable to Russia—and his ease at checkpoints, the mission seems within reach. Our hero, with affected magnanimity, declines monetary compensation, demanding instead safe passage codes from the military official to smooth his journey through the checkpoints. Upon refusal, he vows to continue his evacuations from the conflict zone, proclaiming he ‘can do no other.’ Beyond this, the film’s proceedings defy adequate description, so erratic are its form and narrative.
The antagonist, Russian Colonel Strelnikov (Vyacheslav Dovzhenko), like Kostyantyn, incites derision with his simplistic portrait, eliciting disdain not towards the character but towards the filmmakers. Despite attempts to show the complexity of ostensibly human—not merely political—relations and the determinism of barbarism, the story clumsily oscillates between romanticizing the brutality of the Russian invaders and caricaturing the piety of the Ukrainians. Moreover, the film suffers from glaring production flaws, from crude color grading to a literal desynchronisation of audio and visuals.
Cinéma des Lumière is hailed not merely because it is the oldest, but because it alone, unlike other arts, extracts the quintessence of existence from contemporaneity. Stanislav Tiunov’s film seems to align itself with Méliès instead, determined to offer a peculiar spectacle. The result illustrates how exploiting contemporary tragedies without due reverence leads not only to a moral fiasco, but to a dramaturgical one as well. The film concludes with a happy ending, but can the ongoing horror in reality truly be supplanted by such a sickeningly saccharine illusion on screen? Highly unlikely.