Direct translation via Google Translate. Edited.
I had the privilege of watching the film on a Russian language video site about a week before its release.
By Maxim Voronov
21 August 2021 , 09:49 - REGNUM
More than seven years later, events in Donbass are no longer in the first positions in news feeds. The war that the Ukrainian authorities are waging with a part of their own population, which began in 2014, continues, despite negotiations in various formats and signed agreements that "have no alternative." In this war, people continue to die, including civilians, whose whole fault is that they do not want to live according to Bandera's orders, abandon the Russian language and allow their children to learn history from crazy textbooks.
Children also die, end up in hospitals with injuries from explosions, wake up from terrible dreams at night. Many of those who were children at the beginning of the punitive operation, mockingly called "ATO," and survived those years, have already grown up, but they never saw the real world and continue to live under the threat of a new Bandera leap. Smoldering wars tend to suddenly flare up again.
Film by Maxim Brius and Mikhail Wasserbaum- this is an attempt to refresh the memory of the events of seven years ago, to reflect on what a civil war is in reality, and not in the propaganda texts of one side or another, to see how it passes with iron wheels over human destinies, crushing bodies and souls.
"Sunshine" is a very tough film, sometimes extremely ruthless to the nerves of the viewer. You can protest against the "excessive" bloodiness and naturalism, close attention to suffering and death. But this is not a "dark" admiration for horrors, but an attempt to reach out to the fat-swollen soul of a modern "average" viewer, who is difficult to touch with something. The main thing in the film is not at all cinematic delights, although it was filmed quite hard and not flat, therefore it is unlikely to collect a collection of festival awards and will receive the attention of venerable film critics.
The heroes of "Sunshine" are very different people, and among them there is no clear division into major and minor. All the main ones, because each person is the whole Universe, and all the minor ones, because in a war at any moment this Universe can be extinguished as easily and casually as the wind blows out a match.
The film lasts more than two hours, and during this time we get to know a variety of people - former "Afghans" who found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades, former and current criminals, ordinary civilians who are simply trying to survive, children who have not yet finished their educational year, and their old teacher, newcomers in military affairs - militias and "Dobrobatovtsy" - and professional military, also from different sides of the elusive and mobile front line. Few will survive by the finale.
The overarching theme in the film was how characters managed to ignore the ruthless march of events, until they became fed up, and chose sides.
The film is already accused of "propaganda", but there is just a little of it. We can say that there is much less ideology than it could be, the authors seem to be afraid to touch it or simply do not know how to approach it. Almost nothing is said about the attraction of the insurgent residents of Donbass to Russia, the St. George ribbon turns out to be just a symbol of the fact that "the grandfathers fought against the Nazis."...
There is no mention of the events in Odessa on May 2, although they have already occurred. We also hardly hear about Bandera's essence of the Maidan. There are anti-fascist slogans and crossed out swastikas, but the fascism of the Dobrobatists appears only in cruelty to prisoners, that is, from a very specific ideology, it is simply turned into a symbol of this very cruelty and hatred of foreigners and dissidents. It is not very clear in the end what kind of faith or set of principles drove the rebels.
There was a reference to Odessa in news presented on film, but no blatant reference.
However, unprincipled toasts "to all the good" and the hope that "we are one country," and therefore "they won’t bomb," turn out to be an illusion, which in an instant is dispelled by a fiery wind with a hail of lead. Romantic boyish impulses and attempts of veterans to hide from everyday problems in the war or to escape from the war, having "gorged" on it in their youth, also cannot withstand the collision with reality.
Someone dies without having accomplished the feat, someone is killed by acute remorse, and someone still changes the steering wheel of an ambulance to a machine gun, having lost everything at once. "Sunshine", fortunately, is equally far from both pacifist preaching and saber-rattling, and this is its honesty.
Alas, the authors should have stopped right after the hero of Maxim Dakhnenko draws a line under his moral throwing, and the hero of Alexander Bukharovcomes to ask for the front line. Unfortunately, the authors suddenly remembered that in addition to the shrill and terrible human component of war, there is also big politics. Precisely suddenly, because the ending turned out to be not just crumpled, but as if stuck from a completely different, much more primitive film, from those of which there is no point in talking about.
Here is an imposing American general, and foreign mercenaries (among them, of course, the great-grandson of an SS man) who intend to eat corpses on whiskey, and a bold allusion to the "Wagner group", designed so vulgarly and crudely that it causes an attack of nausea. These most conventional "Wagnerians" are so disproportionately long and meaningfully removed into the sunset that it resembles a cross between the ending of a bad western with a specific commercial.
The film ended with a squad of Wagner operatives ambushing a rocket artillery launcher unit, saving the day. If that is his beef, at least there was no reference to the "Green Men" AKA Russian special forces, who carried out the more difficult tasks in the Donbass.
Of course.
The film bears both pluses and minuses of modern domestic "war" cinema. On the one hand is sincere humanity, solicitude for the heroes, the desire to make them as alive as possible, moral tension. On the other hand, there is a fear of ideology as such, the replacement of ideology by “patriotism of the place”, a not very intelligible image of the enemy and only a slightly more intelligible image of our own people. Plus - sudden and very inappropriate attempts to speak in the language of political shows and jump on the armor of officialdom or memes popular in the “couch troops” (while still avoiding any ideology).
Couch troops is a common slam against commenters on Russian social media who display less than knowledgeable data on the Donbas region.
Nevertheless, despite the obvious "flaws", the film took place. Having watched it, it is very difficult to forget what you saw, this is a rather strong, if not spiritual, then emotional experience. There is a hope that "Sunshine" will be shown not only in films, but also on television, will revive a keen interest in what is happening in the Donbass and will help establish a cordial connection with people who find it very, very difficult to live and defend their right to be themselves.
The only pity is that the film will be shown late at night - perhaps because of the 18+ rating, and maybe because of the "inconvenience" of the topic. One way or another, it's worth sacrificing a couple of hours under the covers for his sake.
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