In”Porcelain War,” a resistant Ukrainian couple divide their time in between 2 apparently antithetical pursuits: When resourceful Slava Leontyev isn’t training fellow civilian soldiers in the continuous battle versus Russia’s intrusion, he and his partner Anya Stasenko are experienced ceramic artists, casting and painting pretty porcelain figurines motivated by regional nature and folklore. If the title currently recommends something pointed because variation, this emotive launching by Leontyev and American co-director Brendan Bellomo leaves absolutely nothing to opportunity in guaranteeing we get it: Porcelain, we are informed, is “vulnerable however long lasting, and can be brought back after centuries.” Lest the point still be lost on us, the couple’s combined voiceover later on provides a blunter paraphrase: “Ukraine resembles porcelain– simple to break, however difficult to ruin.”
The metaphor is clear enough, then; whether it’s rather complicated sufficient to sustain a feature-length documentary is another concern. “Porcelain War” prospers on contrast, much of it poignant. Prior to the Russian intrusion of Ukraine in February 2022, Slava and Anya lived an agrarian life in rural Crimea, and the movie frequently cuts dramatically from gilded magic-hour video footage of that picturesque current past– rambling and foraging in the forest with their scrappy pet dog Frodo, diving into sun-lacquered lakes, crafting in their rustic home– and the cold gray light of their contemporary metropolitan presence in war-torn Kharkiv, where they moved rather of leaving the nation completely. There, his weaponry competence and her long-lasting dedication to making art are framed as 2 halves of a joined resistance effort: war stabilized by love, bloodshed by appeal.
Enamored of this in theory merged dichotomy, Leontyev and Bellomo do not peer too far into its clashing daily implications, or its result on the couple’s dedicated relationship. Leaps in between relaxing video of their domestic life together (total with the fragile, fanciful art that comes out of it) and queasy first-person fight video from the Bakhmut frontline are disconcerting by style, providing this otherwise decently developed doc a brute effect that possibly assisted land it the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance’s U.S. Documentary area. What’s missing out on are the more amplified information, the ethical and mental fallout, of Slava and Anya’s remarkable regimen– now assisted by a double contacting us to develop and ruin.
Leontyev provides his own subjective wartime experience with brilliant sensory aplomb, the dynamically roaming cam (typically directed by his friend Andrey Stefanov) accompanied by a fevered, clattering rating from DakhaBrakha, a self-described “ethic turmoil” band based in Kyiv. Less quickly articulated stress and anxieties pave the way to a concentrate on more poetic suitables and images. Great porcelain figurines of forest animals, their bodies painted with entire abundant pastel environments, function as a confident, even redemptive symbolic counterpoint to the carnage and hazard of his present day task; for such little, valuable things, they do rather a great deal of heavy lifting. Later on, Slava and Anya’s abilities overlap to eerier impact when she provides a whimsical paint task to among the bomber drones released by Saigon, his portentously-named military system of scrappy volunteers: We later on see it in action over identified Russian infantryman, a colorfully striped dragonfly of death.
The filmmakers make generous usage of electronic camera drones to record these other drones in action; the resulting scenes of aerial warfare are both vertiginously outstanding and discomfitingly gung-ho. An accomplished visual impacts manager whose credits consist of the 2012 Sundance smash “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Bellomo is attuned to the jolting feelings of battle both on the ground and above it, and unsurprisingly supportive to his topics’ visual enthusiasms. In a number of artfully animated series, their art work are brought flowingly to life, though the result is little bit more than prettifying.
Bellomo isn’t, nevertheless, an adequately permeating observer or job interviewer to coax out the honest human doubts or worries that his 2 primary topics otherwise leave unmentioned, and their joint narrative feels more stoically inspiring than confessional. “It’s seriously crucial to smile every now and then,” Anya states of their productions, even more describing that she’s “making art for our time, for our nation.” We mainly see Anya in certainly smiling, enthusiastic mode; the movie’s picture of a marital relationship in wartime is touching in its representation of equally encouraging love, yet any more anguished intimacy under attempting scenarios is kept out of view.
It’s when the movie’s attention turns to cameraman Stefanov that a rawer point of view emerges. A previous painter who, unlike his pals, feels not able to produce art in the middle of such chaos, he relates over a number of ravaging minutes the experience of driving his spouse and 2 children to the security of the Polish border, directly protecting their passage in the face of alarming traffic lines, gas lacks and Russian shelling, and being allowed just the most general of farewells as the border gates closed. It’s a disproportionately painful testament for its sidebar positioning in procedures. His desolate issues that the separation will permanently impact his bond with his kids strike more difficult than Anya’s parallel commentary– laid over images of a beautiful porcelain mollusc– that “a refugee is a snail without a shell.” In “Porcelain War,” the truth of living in a shattered nation tends to surpass any accompanying metaphor.