Shortly after the implosion of the Soviet Union and the appearance of Russia and Ukraine as separate countries, a Ukrainian lady, resident of Crimea, says she got into a taxi and informed her destination in Russian. The driver, an outraged patriot, said he wouldn’t take her if she didn’t speak Ukrainian.
Another rants guiltlessly about a silly idiosyncrasy. “I can skin the first Russian that comes my way, but when it comes to speaking and thinking, my words are all structured in Russian.” The two characters are real and play themselves in the documentary “Close Relationships” by Vitali Manski, himself on screen as part of the plot.
The film was on the schedule of the last edition of the É Tudo Verdade festival.
Manski was born and lived until the age of 18 in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv. He left her to study cinema in Moscow. He became a Russian citizen and shot 17 films from 1990 onwards. In 2015 he returned to Lviv to visit his mother.
He is now, bizarrely, a citizen of foreign nationality and is faced with difficulties in the first version of a military conflict in Ukraine. And it’s not a rhetorical question. Russia has annexed Crimea and sponsored a civil war in which eastern provinces are trying to secede from Kiev and join the Moscow regime in a bag and gourd.
It is a scenario similar to the current outbreak, which however is much bloodier, because the Russians invaded Ukraine with the project of materially destroying it and making it unfeasible in demographic terms.
Allowing the clocks to go back six years to understand the current war was an unwitting ploy during which Manski struggled with his cultural roots, to understand a mutual hatred (Russians/Ukrainians) that in the past communism hid beneath the proletarian brotherhood.
The director only interviews friends and relatives, in order to obtain a cultural portrait in which family psychology is more important than geopolitics. The idea was to build a speech space without self-censorship.
While peeling vegetables, Lanski’s mother philosophizes about the war. “Every answer leads to a new question, and this is all very complicated.” Unintentionally, she enunciates the idea of ​​circularity that will be present throughout the entire documentary.
Cultural identity runs through this circle. She is both Austro-Hungarian, Latvian, Polish and Russian. A peasant says he is not sure if he ever encountered someone who was ethnically unmixed. A city like Sevastopol, says the narrator, brings together the cosmopolitanism of Jewish merchants and intellectuals who write in Russian.
By disorganizing production, the war dollarized the economy. In Odessa — and we are in Ukraine — two workers who were renovating the apartment of the filmmaker’s sister disappeared for a year. And they reappeared to work for $45 a week. It’s cheap, says Manski’s brother-in-law. Mercenaries who fight alongside the separatists earn US$1,200 a month, and officers, up to US$4,200. An aunt of the filmmaker discusses with her daughter how many dollars to set aside in the long-distance budget.
As they watch the funeral of a dignitary from a cafe table, two well-dressed and made-up young women relate a family anecdote. The father of one of them called the mechanic and asked him to change the oil in his car. The man, on the cell phone, answered in the trench. He became a pro-Russian separatist soldier. But how do you let a fighter talk on the cell phone? It happens.
There is a soldier in the filmmaker’s family. Or rather, a young man who is drafted into the Ukrainian Army. His mother believed for a few moments that he would go through a training camp. Someone suggests, however, that the recruit’s learning will be combat. Then alarmist information emerges. An aunt refers to the graves with 300 soldiers that will never be declared. It’s for disorganization and not to make a fuss.
We are in the capital, Kiev. An old decommissioned bus works as a ticket office to sell tickets for an $8 tour to the private residence of former President Viktor Yanukovych — then exiled to Russia after flirting with Ukraine’s entry into the European Union.
The gardens and the palace are splendid, Versailles style, “with 800 employees”, the halls covered by a floor of rare woods. There is a painful contrast between this luxury and the bareness of residential neighborhoods built during communism, gray blocks and architecturally unattractive.
Through them, Ukraine is a country devoid of charm or beauty, with no flowers in the gardens or statues to break the monotony of the poor landscape. European-standard poverty, which Russian missiles now turn into ruins.
