Volcano/Вулкан (2019)
Dir. Roman Bondarchuk, Ukraine. Seen at Eastern Neighbours Film Festival, The Hague, November 2019.
As a young OSCE interpreter from Kyiv, Lukas is tasked with accompanying foreign experts on observation missions to the conflict-affected southern and eastern corners of Ukraine. On the journey south, the team’s SUV breaks down. He leaves the vehicle to go find coverage to make a call but by the time he gets back, the car, along with its valuable passengers, has disappeared. A series of misfortunes means that he’s left without documents, phone, or wallet, and is taken in by a local man, Vova, living with his teenage daughter (somewhat unbelievably, the only pair of experienced actors in the film — Serhiy Stepanskiy, playing Lukas, is astonishingly a sound designer by trade) and his elderly mother by the edge of a colossal artificial lake. As his efforts to leave repeatedly fall through, Volcano brilliantly traps the viewer along with Lukas, run aground in a borderland deep within his own country.
Like a low-frequency hum, there is a constant awareness that Ukraine’s ongoing conflict is being played out beneath the backdrop of the film. Masked men without insignia melt seamlessly in and out of sunflower fields; Ukrainian army convoys roar past under the cover of darkness. Through the perspective of Lukas, you are left with the unsettling sense that something deeply disturbing is always just across the horizon — but the conflict itself is never actually depicted. Vova talks more about the bones of German soldiers who fought here in the Second World War, believing that Lukas can help him make foreign contacts to sell the bones on to living relatives in Germany (much to the young man’s disgust).
For those living by the lake, violence comes in other forms. After the sun goes down, local boys clash with each other in waves, with nothing better to do than slash tires or attack each other with chains, nets, or hammers. There’s the suffocating sense that Lukas is in a bad dream; he jumps on a bus only to realise it is going to the watermelon fields controlled by the same masked, armed, anonymous men he saw earlier. The camera masterfully captures the close-up of his face as quiet panic slowly spreads across his features, trapped in the fishbowl of the rattling minibus glass. Fields scattered with the pink flesh of watermelons speed past faster and faster, as he realises he cannot get off the ride.
It would have been easy for the filmmakers to present Lukas as entering the ‘wild east’ as a western Ukrainian. Volcano could have been a story about a man from Lviv, Ukraine’s cultural capital, or from a cosy Carpathian town, and his experience of culture shock on the opposite side of the country. But the societal boundary between eastern and western, or Russian and Ukrainian-speaking is a tired trope, and a theme that western audiences and analysts have placed far more attention on than what is apparent in everyday life. The film succeeds in showing that this division is misleading –Vova’s mother watches Russian television channels, but on eyeing a speech by Putin from her armchair, she mutters to herself: “What is he blabbering on about now?” Instead, the story reflects a more subtle boundary: the difference in realities for urban and rural populations, and in particular the divide between those who can see a future, and those who only see the past.
To Lukas, where Vova lives is backwards, its people thieves and cheaters. He is ridiculed for his naïve belief that the police will help him, and his conceptualisations of law and order (and even the value of money) soon collapse, along with his status as an OSCE interpreter. Reality seems malleable in the hands of who has the most brute force. But while he berates Vova for his vulgarity and for not doing ‘honest’ work, he later uncovers that his host once directed the local collective fish farm. When the socialist system collapsed, Vova carefully and honestly redistributed its capital, as instructed by the authorities. The lake itself is the result of the creation of a dam, which sunk 60 villages so that power could be provided to the surrounding cities and industry. The homes, churches, and cemeteries of thousands of people were the price that had to be paid so that future generations like Lukas could grow up comfortably.
The crude, vulgar picture that appears at first glance is rendered more complex. Arriving in the barren landscape in a crisp button-up shirt, as the days drag on into weeks Lukas assimilates into his surroundings. His shirt crumples around him and his face becomes more creased. Eventually, realising his valued identity as an OSCE interpreter is worthless, he takes up wearing Vova’s faded t-shirts; for one reason or another, he is in no rush to leave. But he finds himself reminded that because he comes from Kyiv, he is (quite literally) still considered a foreigner. In one effortlessly comic moment, Vova’s mother hisses at him to hide in another room of the house — in German. His privilege is stark, not just in terms of material possessions, but also clear in how he experiences being a Ukrainian. She asks him what he has back home in the capital: a wife, a car, a house, a dacha. The question turns rhetorical: “and you have deputies, yes? And ministers, and a president.” She pauses. “We do not have these things.”
Perhaps my only criticism about this film is the fact that for foreign audiences, the impression of Ukraine that they are left with is one of anarchy, corruption, and lawlessness, a barren country where violence is at every corner. Having spent time in rural Ukraine, the insinuation that going to such an area will leave you robbed (or half dead in a ditch) is something I would be first to dispel. The film also doesn’t show cities like Kyiv for what they are; lively and vibrant, at once modern and historical, full of ambitious, forward-thinking people. But it is clear that including this side of reality in the film would disrupt from the almost Tarkovskian dream that Bondarchuk manages to create. He immerses the audience in the liminality of Lukas’ experience, stuck somewhere between a nightmare and a fantasy, but grounded in the very real reality of a community trapped between war and peace, present and past. Vova asks Lukas why he came to this place. “I came here because of I am in the middle of the 5th 7-year cycle”, he cryptically tells the man who used to direct the local state enterprise. Like Vova once was, the modern, young interpreter is driven by his own kind of five-year plan, one that propels his career, his ambitions, and his happiness. Yet, lost in purgatory, it feels like he finally feels free.
