The final time Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa made a documentary about modern occasions in his homeland was again in 2014: “Maidan,” a rigorously observational chronicle of the Euromaidan rebellion in Kyiv, was each speedy and calmly indifferent. Eschewing overt narrative shaping or rhetoric for clear-eyed witnessing, it was completely of-the-moment filmmaking that nonetheless felt constructed to final as a historic doc. A comparable method yields related rewards in “The Invasion,” Loznitsa’s keenly awaited and patiently assembled response to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. A set of stoic, straightforwardly shot and cumulatively wrenching vignettes from a rustic in disaster, doing its greatest to maintain the lights on and hope alive, it acts as an efficient sister work to “Maidan” — albeit one which, a decade in the past, no one wished could be made.
A current Cannes premiere now making the pageant rounds, “The Invasion” is hardly first to the subject: This yr alone has seen an Oscar win for Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” whereas Sundance winner Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s “Porcelain Struggle” and Oleh Sentsov’s GoPro battle examine “Actual” be a part of Loznitsa’s newest within the Karlovy Differ lineup. “The Invasion,” nonetheless, doesn’t got down to immerse viewers within the chaos of armed warfare, as a substitute providing a view of on a regular basis life persevering with (in ceaselessly compromised, disrupted style) via the battle: weddings, funerals, spiritual gatherings, faculty courses, hospital classes, and so forth. Shot over the course of the final two years — not with Loznitsa current, however by a number of small crews across the nation — the challenge resulted in 30 quick movies of various lengths, woven by Loznitsa and his co-editor Danielius Kokanauskis right into a nationwide tapestry of mourning and resilience.
The movie opens on its most solemn word, with a unprecedented 15-minute sequence detailing the formal processions and procedures of a army funeral in Kyiv for various males killed in battle. Amid the pomp and ceremony and group prayer, with mourners continuing to the town’s politically auspicious Independence Sq. after the service, it’s arduous to not give attention to the smooth, shattered faces of the pallbearers: barely grown males, a few of them, reckoning with the worth and fragility of their very own lives. Loznitsa swiftly counters such devastation with adjoining, jubilant footage of a younger soldier’s marriage ceremony. Dressed for the event in his fight fatigues, their khaki tones setting off the cotton-candy pink of his bride’s rose bouquet, he lifts and twirls her — the longer term all theirs, no less than for a second. Minimize to a different, smaller funeral for a 32-year-old soldier, the place a priest insists that with “God and good on our aspect, we will prevail.”
“The Invasion” is constructed on such back-and-forth motion between hard-won pleasure and overwhelming sorrow, with its structural temper swings and repetitions evoking the rhythm of day-to-day survival for Ukrainian residents. At 145 minutes, economic system just isn’t the target right here: Moderately, we achieve a tense of time both stalling or slipping in these making an attempt circumstances. Elsewhere, we watch village volunteer troopers on their supply rounds, deftly alternating between the distribution of important army and medical provides and handing out Christmas presents to grateful however reticent kindergarteners. We go to one hospital the place current amputees endure strenuous bodily remedy, and one other the place, within the maternity ward, a uniformed soldier and his spouse gawp over their new child, their wider anxieties without delay suspended and intensified by the brand new arrival. In a faculty classroom, pre-teens eagerly sing conventional Cossack victory anthems earlier than an air-raid siren prompts them to relocate to a bunker the place class continues as earlier than — even the children doing so with an unfazed effectivity that smacks of routine.
In probably the most immediately war-related — and grueling — passage, we’re introduced with an astonishing aerial view of a current bomb web site, combed over by emergency staff as they search survivors amid the rubble. Condo blocks, sliced open by explosions, endure as ghostly reminders of destroyed or vacated communities, whereas in one other shot, a girl picks out usable bricks from what stays of her ruined house, getting ready to rebuild. Away from the town, and certainly from the battle solely, sure traditions proceed unimpeded: A river is a congregation level both for a mass baptism ritual on a cold day, or for an escapist midsummer swim.
The movement of the seasons provides some kind to those disparate scenes, just for the cycle to anticlimactically repeat itself: Because the movie heads right into a second winter at conflict, spirits sink as soon as extra. Freed from commentary or narration, as is Loznitsa’s wont, “The Invasion” doesn’t pursue an overriding emotional tenor by its shut, volleying as a substitute between fury, compassion, despair and guarded optimism, because it appears many a Ukrainian resident does in the middle of any given day. In one among its closing photos, a mom and her teenage daughters consolation one another at a memorial wall coated in pictures of not too long ago misplaced troopers, their expressions caught between anguish and a form of delight. Simply as there isn’t a finish in sight but to this conflict, Loznitsa’s aptly sprawling, typically overwhelming movie arrives at no closing feeling.
