The viewer feels as if trapped by the force of the images and the cruelty of the situations and clings to the fluctuating desire for rebirth of the protagonist.
built on two rigorous aesthetic choices
Vidblysk (Reflection), the film in competition of
Ukrainian director Valentyn Vaasyanovych
: the fixity of the camera that does not move within the same long shot and the surprising freedom with which the sequences follow one another, throwing off every possible prediction. As if to say that the spectator’s eye must remain blocked and not take his gaze away from what is shown to him, but that he cannot even predict what the next scene will bring.
Two authoritarian devices that serve to direct the reading of the subject at the base of the film, to determine and amplify its meaning. What then are the consequences on the population of the Donbass war, when the separatists of eastern Ukraine declared independence from the motherland, explicitly supported by the Russians. At the center of the film is a Ukrainian surgeon, Serhiy (Roman Lutskly), who is captured because the car in which he was carrying an injured person has gone the wrong way. Spared by the Russians who use it to check if they have gone too far with torture, Serhiy is forced to witness (and the spectator with him) the cruelties of the war, witnessing the torture to which the new partner of his ex-wife (Nadiya Levchenko) left for the front. Released after an exchange of prisoners, the doctor returns to his cozy home where nothing will be the same again, neither in relations with his ex-wife, to whom he does not have the courage to say what he witnessed, nor with his daughter Polina ( Nika Myslytska) with whom he tries to establish a more empathic parental bond.
To observe this slow and tiring return to life one spectator who feels as if he has been trapped by the strength of the images and the cruelty of the situations and which clings to the fluctuating desire for rebirth of the protagonist. Just as the Ukrainians who found themselves fighting a war they suffered and from which they could not take their eyes off must have tried to do.
September 8, 2021 (change September 8, 2021 | 10:06 am)
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