Connection lost

The Guide begins with the scene when kobzars are sent to death. The blind people are loaded to freight cars to be taken to the place of the planned massacre. The main character named Peter (Anton Sviatoslav Greene), son of American engineer who was killed by Chekists, is hiding behind a wagon in a child-size coal box. For the boy, this is the end of the trip: the preparation for the execution and the execution itself serve as the frames to the film.

There are two plot lines in The Guide: after losing his father, Peter unwillingly becomes the leader of blind kobzar Ivan Kocherha (Stanislav Boklan) and, actually, Kocherha who fights against cruel and artful Chekist Volodymyr (Oleksandr Kobzar), his former fellow soldier from the UNR time. This is a personal war for the latter two. It was caused by Volodymyr’s betrayal long time ago. Peter’s goal is to survive and attest to what he saw (we hear the voice of the narrator who, as we can guess, is old-aged Peter). The events unfold in 1932-34 and cover the period from the beginning of the Holodomor till the Kharkiv congress of Kobzars which was used by the NKVD as a trap.

The screenplay (Oleksandr Irvanets, Iren Rozdobudko) is well-organized, at least at the beginning; the rhythm of the events gets quicker or slower, whenever it needs too. The work of cameraman Serhii Mykhalchuk, Oles Sanin’s long-time teammate, is worth a special mentioning; the footage of landscapes and concert episodes is above praise. Another well-known name is Dzhamala who plays the        role of theater actress Olha Levytska. The episodes show one of the best Ukrainian kobzars Taras Kompanichenko, whereas Serhii Zhadan plays the role of an avant-garde poet.

The PR team of the project is worth of a special mentioning as well. The Guide has probably become the first Ukrainian film, when the premiere was preceded by well-elaborated and apt promotion campaign: from portions of information skillfully injected in mass media to boards with Dzhamala and slogan “Close your eyes. Watch with your heart.” In a word, they acted ambitiously and involved real stars.

One of the important tasks of the film was to show the terrible and great time. There is a well-known way of showing such things: through the lives of ordinary citizens. For these lives to stir interest, the leading characters should be multi-tone: be sometimes dramatic, funny, scared, and courageous.

However, the result has a predictable division into black and white, into absolute evil and absolute good. Into one-dimensional Cheka demons and no less one-dimensional sacred Ukrainians. No one changes during the film either for better, or for worse. From the very beginning the only intonation is used: there is a sullen blind knight Kocherha, a monotonous cruel coward Volodymyr, and clever and modest Peter – this way it preserves till the final. Both Boklan and Kobzar are wonderful and obviously talented actors. But they, like Anton Greene, have in a sense nothing to play. Dzhamala is wonderful when she is singing, her performance on stage is brilliant, which is why it is especially regrettable that this inspired transformation vanishes somewhere when it comes to actor routine, dialogs and close-ups with her heroine.

The dramaturgy of the second part of The Guide has some small, but regrettable lack of logical coordination between separate scenes. Almost all scenes connected with Ivan’s love Orysia are openly weak either because of the lack of needed emotions, or because of their abundance: lyrical moments lack a smile (humor is not Sanin’s forte) and artistic delicacy, the dramatic scenes are so rude, with shouts, groaning, and crumpled ending, that things that should be scary don’t scare at all.

Because of the abovementioned monotonousness of the heroes, logical and dramaturgical flaws, the conceptual result of The Guide boils down to another exposure of the crimes of the Communism, although it was supposed to be a so-called educational novel, i.e., a story about the end of childhood and growing up. For the achieved result a publicist sketch would be enough.

So, The Guide is an indisputable success of Ukrainian cinema as an industry, but, unfortunately, at the same time it is an artistic disappointment.

But the failure of The Guide is only a part of a broader problem which lies in the wrong strategy. One of the best Ukrainian film directors, Serhii Loznytsia, outlined it wonderfully, “Cinema is a collective illusion, and Ukraine has every reason to create a collective illusion of its own, because a hero has appeared here. Russia doesn’t have a hero. A hero is the one who fights injustice, and there has been a precedent when this injustice was overcome. Now in Ukraine films can be created which are dedicated to emergence of such heroes, like neo-realism in Italy. For we can feel the elevation, the energy is whirling, and we have every reason for such cinematography to be created.”

We must remember about our past, we need to talk about it. But such mass art as cinema is developed in present time. The audience wants to recognize itself on the screen, it cannot be given all the time a set of topics and characters which has remained unchanged over the past twenty-five years; the plots, including the historical ones, should not be  driven again into the stylistics of poetic cinema, which has long ago stopped to meet the reality, both social and artistic.

Renew the connection with the audience. Ukrainians must see themselves. They have become the heroes of history: make them the heroes of your stories. They deserve this.