Sometimes a single image can be strong enough to support the weight of an entire film, even a film as heavy as Maryna Er Gorbach’s horrifyingly domestic anti-war drama “Klondike,” which fixes its gaze upon a feisty pair of Ukrainian farmers who live along the Russian border. It does so by blowing a giant hole into the side of Tolik (Serhill Shadrin) and Irka’s (Okshana Cherkashyna) house in the opening scene, as an errant mortar shell — misfired by the Kremlin-friendly separatists next door in the middle of the night — obliterates the outer wall of the married couple’s living room as they argue over whether or not to flee Hrabove and raise their unborn child somewhere else.
The exasperated husband wants to avoid conflict at any cost, while his very pregnant wife refuses to abandon their home just because the impotent local men are determined to play war with the big toys Putin lent them. On the one hand, that massive explosion might seem to settle the debate in Tolik’s favor. On the other hand, Irka was just saying she wanted a big window that would allow her to see out onto the rolling fields that stretch beyond their home — a mordantly ironic detail that proves typical of Gorbach’s death-streaked gallows humor.
The floor-to-ceiling wound that Irka gets instead becomes a permeable backdrop for the film that follows, with the war unfolding in the distance as Tolik and his wife bicker, work, and watch soccer on TV. At one point a squadron of armed soldiers casually strolls up to the property and over the threshold, suggesting a nightmarish twist on “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” “I am tired of all the fights in my house,” Irka sighs at one point early on, this very pregnant woman still laboring under the idea that it’s possible to draw the line between where her house ends and the world outside begins.
Needless to say, Irka has no patience for the war (she threatens to rip Tolik’s dick off whenever he threatens to get involved with the separatists), and it would take a lot more than a mortar shell to make her run for the hills. Case in point: Even after one of her neighbors blows Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 out of the sky with a surface-to-air missile the next day, July 17, 2014, instantly adding almost 300 new civilian casualties to the war in the Donbas, Irka refuses to move out.
Is she defiant, or is she delusional? If “Klondike” offers a clear answer to that question, it’s only through its unyielding refusal to pretend that anyone else gives a damn. War is a retaliation against such clearly established borders, not an act of reinforcing them. And yet Gorbach’s high-concept drama is so hard to shake precisely because Irka never loses sight of how that notion might cut both ways. By the time this harrowing film arrives at its remarkable final scene, Irka’s decision to stand her ground has become less an alternative to survival than a victory over death itself.
Its somewhat lost-in-translation title alluding to the empty promise of the American gold rush, “Klondike” is both deeply entrenched in the geopolitical dynamics of the Donbas circa 2014, and also keenly attuned to Irka’s disinterest in them. There’s no reason to assume she has any sympathy for the pro-Russian separatists who skulk around in search of food, agents of their own starvation, but her distaste for them has less to do with their military agenda than it does her own personal misery. Perhaps it’s harder to be frightened of people you’ve known all your life, like Tolik’s childhood friend Sanya, who thinks he’s a big shot now that someone has given him some heavy artillery he clearly doesn’t know how to use (the men in this movie are no smarter or more sophisticated than the animals on Irka’s farm, which makes it that much harder to stomach that the relatively sensitive Tolik still talks about his wife’s future as if she were a pregnant heifer).
If Irka is uncommonly practical for someone living in such volatile conditions, she’s also something of a fantasist as well. You can see it in (what’s left of) her living room wallpaper, a tableaux of a Hawaiian sunset, its tackiness adding to the sense that the entire house is a blackly comic object. And you can hear it in how Irka tells her husband that she isn’t scared, her voice full of a bit more conviction than it should be (both lead actors are utterly believable, and remain so even when the film around them doesn’t). Of course, that’s before a commercial airliner is downed just a few hundred meters from where her front door used to be, raining stray pieces of fuselage down onto the farmland below.
Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the MA17 incident doesn’t play a more prominent role in this story — it tracks that Irka is more immediately concerned about the wheel that blows off her stroller during the earlier mortar blast. But the pyre of black CGI smoke that burns in the distance is so far removed from Irka’s most immediate concerns that it comes to feel more like an unimaginably grim date marker than anything else, as the magnitude of its tragedy and the immensity of its spectacle (most of which is mercifully left to the imagination) pull focus from the people at hand. While Irka and the passengers aboard that ill-fated plane might belong to the same category of innocent bystanders, the convoluted process of drawing such broad parallels dilutes the simple power of Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi’s camerawork, which frame Irka against the landscape in a series of long and probing shots that silently illustrate her connection to her country.
“Klondike” has a tendency to overextend itself whenever its attention drifts away from Tolik and Irka’s see-through living room, as the film displays an occasional discomfort with the idea that its set might be more compelling than any of the individual characters who inhabit it (a bug that Jonathan Glazer’s conceptually similar “Zone of Interest” inverts into a feature). Tolik’s ambivalence about what to do is compellingly fraught, but the eventual introduction of Irka’s anti-separatist brother sparks a contrived tug-of-war that feels reverse-engineered from its tragic conclusion.
On the flipside, however, this visceral portrait of life during wartime is at its most harrowing and unshakeable when it confronts the heightened reality of its conceit with the apathetic naturalism of its drama. If you don’t understand what I mean by that now, I suspect the last scene of Gorbach’s film will clarify things a great deal, as those heart-stopping final minutes thread the needle between fact and allegory with a forcefulness that binds the entire project together. War may be inescapable, but life is more tenacious than death could ever be.
Grade: B+
Samuel Goldwyn Films will release “Klondike” in theaters on Friday, August 4.
