08/05/2009

"TARAS BULBA": my impressions and thoughts

         I saw the film on the 7th of April (five days later its release) and it had a firm grip on me. I went out of the cinema like striken and all was flowing before my eyes - so deep my perception was!  My heart was filled with various feelings: I asked myself where that great Russia is! Why did we lose our great power?...Actually, I`ve already got this film on my comp,...but I have no resoluteness to see it again, no courage to be dissapointed...

...Not to speak about feelings! It is a historical drama film, based on a novel of the same title by Nikolai Gogol. The movie (alternative title Zaporizhian Sich) has been filmed on different locations in Ukraine such as Zaporizhia, Khotyn and Kamianets-Podilskyi as well as in Poland. The film was partly financed by the Russian Ministry of Culture and has been criticized in Ukraine for being political propaganda and to "resemble leaflets for Putin". The Ukrainian-born director Vladimir Bortko has also stated that the movie was aimed to show that "there is no separate Ukraine". He was quoted as saying: "The Russians and Ukrainians are the same people and the Ukraine is the southern part of the Rus'. They cannot exist without us and we cannot without them. Now we are two states and also in the past there were such periods. The Ukrainian soil belonged to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and to Poland. But the people who lived on both territories were always one people. Gogol understood that well and always spoke of it." This view is strongly opposed by sections of the Ukrainian society. In Russia there are fears that the movie will exacerbate historical disagreements with Ukraine.

The film is also cautiously watched in Poland, where its possible anti-Polish character is widely discussed and its propagandist elements examined. This is enhanced by the fact that the filmmakers added some scenes depicting Polish brutality to the original plot by Gogol.

Of course, this film was not created to be historically precise. I think it reminds both Ukraine and Russia that we are united, we have the same roots, we have always been connected by the fraternal friendship...and now...what do we have?  We are loosing our faces sharing grounds  and proving who the strongest is!!!! Shame on YOU!!!!

In the forum I read a lot of commentaries both Russian and Ukranian spectators. A lot of discontent! I can`t understand :they judge if it`s good or bad only by the actors and costumes and so on!!! And what about feelings this film aroused?

I quite agree with a man from Russia Ivan Denisoff who commented: "This movie is about tremendously difficult choice between different values, between devotion to motherland (fatherland) and love for a woman, between traditional values of Russian people and values of west though in this movie we see how allegedly enlightened polish gentry (regarding itself as beings of higher order than cossacks ) executes cossacks in the most cruel way." That`s the point!!!  At the heart of the film is great Russia. In the opening scene, Bulba, played by the extraordinary Ukrainian actor Bogdan Stupka, rallies his soldiers with a speech that was committed to memory by generations of Soviet schoolchildren: “No, brothers, to love as the Russian soul loves is to love not with the mind or anything else, but with all that God has given, all that is within you.” 

Bad reviews began coming in from Kiev, Ukraine’s capital, well before the film opened. 

“Russian history is short of heroes, and they are borrowing others’,” sniped Oleg Tyagnibok, the leader of the nationalist Freedom Party. Writing for the Unian news agency, Ksenia Lesiv asked, “Israelis and Palestinians — are they also one people?” And Volodymyr Voytenko, a prominent Ukrainian film critic, said long stretches of Mr. Bortko’s film “resemble leaflets for Putin.” 

“It’s a very imperial film, that’s what I’d like to say,” said Mr. Voytenko, who founded the film journal Kino-Kolo. “Everything else follows from that fact.”
op Ukrainian officials did not attend the opening in Kiev on April 2. But viewers who emerged from the first showing said they found Mr. Bortko’s message of pan-Slavic unity deeply moving. Yulia Velichko, 20, a student, hesitated at the idea of rejoining the Russian fold, saying, “We fought so hard for our independence.” But her companion, Valery Skuratov, was convinced. 

“We should join Russia,” he said. “We’re closer to them than we are to the Amerikozy,” a mildly derogatory term for Americans.
At the film premiere in Moscow’s Kinoteatr Oktyabr, which seats 3,000, the audience applauded at Bulba’s “Russian soul” speech, and then again when the Cossacks thundered through western Ukraine, holding torches, to drive out the Poles. Among those who felt exaltation was an ultranationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. 

“It’s better than a hundred books and a hundred lessons,” he told Vesti-TV after the premiere. “Everyone who sees the film will understand that Russians and Ukrainians are one people — and that the enemy is from the West.”
 Anyway , the film provokes discussions and opinions and this is what real art must do! Hope I`ll take heart to see it again ...but I know tears will be in my eyes, and my heart will ache...

Interesting to read:

http://globalcomment.com/2009/the-politics-of-taras-bulba-do-they-matter/

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/13/world/europe/13cossacks.html?_r=1&ref=global-home

http://www.day.kiev.ua/201827/

http://ruskino.ru/mov/8500/photo - фотографии со съёмок

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1242457/