QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
Near the beginning of writer and director Harald Hutter’s Leleka, an uncut sequence shows a young woman in close-up, lying on her side and facing the camera, as two thumbs belonging to someone else tenderly rub the woman’s forehead and cheeks. The pure bliss of this scene derives not just from the shot’s length, but also from its haptic nature. For the sight of that intimate contact, combined with the closely recorded and amplified sound of the woman’s breaths and palpated flesh, has an effect almost like ASMR on the viewer, as though we ourselves are feeling those digits caress our own facial skin. As we will soon learn, the woman is Sasha (Olga Kviatovska), and the unseen masseuse is Sasha’s grandmother, also called Sasha – and even as we are made to experience their tight connection, and the relief and comfort that the older Sasha brought to her granddaughter, we are about to discover that the grandmother is no more, that all the warmth and proximity shared between the two Sashas is now a thing of the past, and that this sequence is merely a distant memory.
The sequence, like most of Leleka, is shot on (at times extremely grainy) 16mm in black-and-white. The monochrome is a strong visual representation not just of Sasha’s desperate, despairing fixation on an unresolved past, but also of her traumatised outlook, drained of all colour. Indeed, the only colour in the film comes in short snatches, filmed diegetically on the Bolex camera of Sasha’s French friend Margaux (Margaux Dauby), whose way of seeing the world is less dark. Sasha has been living in Parisian exile and working there as an artist, while her beloved grandmother, who had stayed behind in Okhtyrka, in west Ukraine, Ukraine, has since been killed in war. So Sasha decides to travel back to her homeland to leave an artistic tribute to her grandmother, and Margaux agrees to drive her across the European continent so that she can be with her friend during this difficult time.
Leleka is a road movie, charting change through topography. While the two fellow travellers initially say very little to one another, Sasha gradually opens up, talking about her guilt, her attitudes towards the war, her love for her grandmother, her distance (as much emotional as geographic) from events on the ground, and her horror at what continues to unfold in Ukraine – and so this odyssey is a lament not only for her grandmother, but for her homeland, both of which fill her with feelings of loss. The route they travel may be relatively straight – a succession of motorways and backroads, truck stops and picnic spots – but the journey is frequently modulated by Sasha’s poetic voiceover, and occasional dreamlike interludes, all of which serve to abstractualise, psychologise and universalise her painful journey homewards.
Sasha reveals that “leleka” is the Ukrainian word for the stork, a wading bird which mates for life, grieves the death of its partner and, if its nest is destroyed, both laments the loss in song and tries to rebuild it. In case the allegorical import of this is missed, Sasha, herself occasionally singing, expressly associates the bird with the Ukrainian national character – and the last sound heard in the film, as the two friends take a ferry across the river from Hungary to Ukraine, is the familiar clacking of storks.
Of course, as in all road movies, the road itself, though ever-changing, is a constant fixture – but here one river or another is also the pair’s regular companion. They stop by rivers, stay in lodgings on the banks of rivers in spate, and a river’s churning waters are often superimposed onto the two women’s travels. The river is of course, at least since Heraclitus, a symbol of constant flux – but here, in a sense, its omnipresence also marks Leleka as a feminist response to Francis Ford Coppola’s upriver war epic Apocalypse Now (1979). For Sasha and Margaux too are following snaking waterways into the destructive chaos of war, but they are not themselves warriors, and are not so much seeking the heart of darkness as the heart in it. And while the late Sasha can never be replaced, loyal, listening Margaux is, as much as the granddaughter herself, a continuation of the grandmother’s line in interfemale support and solidarity.
Leleka just premiered in the Rebels with a Cause section of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
