Kritiken

Donbass is the film in which Loznitsa’s work as both fiction and documentary filmmaker come into closest harmony.

With such contrasts, the filmmaker sustains a balance between satirical clout and genuine disgust.

In perhaps the most harrowing scene of all, unbearable in its gradual mood shift and escalation, a man is tied to a pole with a sign announcing him to passersby as a pro-Ukrainian mercenary killer. Its intricate weave of interaction is a lesson not only in how mobs function, but how traumatic experiences and attitudes passed down through generations move virally and boil up again with little need of prodding.

Donbass’ near-Buñuelian episodic structure (in interviews, Loznitza cites The Phantom of Liberty as an influence) acquires a cumulative power.

Unlike last year’s A Gentle Creature, whose pursuit of the random and the lethargic resulted in a film that felt almost unattended, Donbass is piercing and impressively relentless, and its best scenes possess a believably banal and terrifying momentum.

Loznitsa's procedure becomes heavy-handed and contemptuous. . . . This tendentiousness becomes flagrant in the film’s implausible final scene, which pushes the contrast between his understated form and the dubious nature of his content to unhinged extremes. You don’t have to be a Putin booster to feel that, with Donbass, a great filmmaker has discredited himself.

In strict terms of craft, Donbass is an impressive achievement, but its heavy-handedness nevertheless feels inordinate. Since Loznitsa doesn’t provide almost any historical and political context, it’s unlikely that anyone without prior knowledge of the war in Donbass will come out with much actual insight into what’s going on there.

The experience is veritably nightmarish—an unforgiving wallow in images of humanity at its worst—and if I have any hesitation in declaring this, after a single viewing, to be a great, even monumental achievement, it’s generated by my uneasiness regarding Loznitsa’s decision to obfuscate many of his episodes’ political specificity.

A film at once electric and morose, Donbassserves as a guide to the malignant darkness shrouding over the eastern part of the Ukraine: fiction filmmaking with combative intent and a powerful sense of necessity.

Yet the fascination exerted by these interstitial moments is largely a reflection of the misjudged nature of many of the episodes, which often either fail to make an impression or outstay their welcome, or even do both at the same time. The wearyingly shouty, over-extended wedding scene, for example, says at once too much and too little about the system that now governs the Donbass.

Tackling a bloody struggle that these days barely registers in the media beyond the region itself, despite the fact that the shady Ukrainian connections to President Donald Trump and his cronies keep bobbing up in the news, the film feels timely and borne of deep-held despair at the senseless strife tearing the country apart.

Even by the standards of his caustic debut fiction feature My Joy (2010) or last year’s descent-into-hell drama A Gentle Creature, Donbass comes across as savage stuff. A sprawling black comedy with a vast ensemble cast, it evokes a chaotic state of social breakdown in the Donbass region of Ukraine, often with virtuoso brilliance, but it’s sometimes over-stretched vignettes can easily tax the overwhelmed viewer.