QUICK’N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
There are martyred love stories like In the Mood for Love where stable romances are almost but not quite rocked by potential ones. And then there are the destructive lost affairs like Passages (Ira Sachs, 2023) and The Worst Person in the World (Joachim Trier, 2021), where the protagonists destroy relationships with loving people as they sort out confused aspirations and strange new desires. Renovation, with its title that promises both change and stability, fits somewhere in between the two 21st-century romantic traditions.
Lithuanian-Norwegian translator Ilona (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) has a crisis at 30, right around the time she and her boyfriend, Matas (Šarūnas Zenkevičius), move in together. His ringless proposal doesn’t help either: he asks her to marry him so nonchalantly that she doesn’t realise he actually proposed. To Ilona’s surprise, the apartment building needs some renovations and a hunky Ukrainian construction worker named Oleg (Roman Lutskyi) begins to catch her eye and who could blame her?
Oleg and Ilona never go too far with each other. The only intercourse in Renovation comes with the already established couple, and their sexual experiences with each other are one of the key ways Urbonaitė illustrates the relational decline between Ilona and Matas. The first time they have sex with the cameras on is a delightful game of blocking with constantly changing positions; they laugh and tend to each other’s needs throughout the entire scene. The next time they engage in coitus, Ilona is distracted, checked out even, and Matas is short-tempered. All of this is communicated through the choreography of the sex—another damning indictment against the anti-sex in movies crowd.
Technology charmingly factors into the relationships (or lack of) in Renovation. The technology of this world is often giving bad news about the war in Ukraine, hanging ominously over Oleg’s head. As a man of combat age, will he return to his home country and join the fight for sovereignty? What will happen then? Other times, the technology reflects Ilona’s anxieties back to her. This is what happens through the “Should I get married?” online quiz and the quasi-screenlife desktop screen images. Oleg, who shows up disconnected from screens and instead connected to manual labour, threatens these online pseudo-connections in favour of tangible (and sexy) opportunities. The muscular guy on the porch is simply hotter than the nerdy guy away at his desk job!
Urbonaitė is most known as an editor in Lithuanian cinema (Austėja Urbaitė’s Remember to Blink, from 2022), but it’s the camerawork that stands out the most in her latest feature. Shot in 16mm by Vytautas Katkus, the pictures carry a home-video nostalgia quality while also delighting in a soft-romantic aesthetic—a fitting combination considering Ilona’s choice between settling down with her existing boyfriend or pursuing a double-homewrecking affair with her handyman. Romance and homemaking are her two options, and there is an extra irony to that considering the more lurid option fixes homes.
There is something quite poetic about Renovation and not just the poetry that Ilona writes. The visual non-sequiteurs of the cinematography, random shots of construction mostly, are not unlike the pillow shots of Yasujirō Ozu or Aki Kaurismäki. It’s a mundane sort of poetry that doesn’t romanticise the quotidian but instead finds a way to bring the romantic out of the quotidian—and that’s a distinction that matters! It also helps make sense of the ending with Ilona apologising to Matas and being the first to rekindle their lost love. Unlike Passages or The Worst Person in the World, there is a beautiful, forgiving hope for the original couple. And if that isn’t love, I’m not sure what is.
Renovation just premiered in the Baltic Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival. This is my favourite film from the section.
