Don­bass

To gen­er­alise gross­ly, you might say that the films of the arch­ly com­bat­ive Ukrain­ian direc­tor Sergei Loznit­sa are about how cor­rup­tion man­i­fests like a creep­ing fun­gus on all tiers of soci­ety. His fic­tion break­through, 2010’s iron­i­cal­ly titled My Joy, tramped a com­i­cal­ly grim trail through the oppres­sive tac­tics employed by the Ukrain­ian state, from bent politi­cos to pow­er-trip­ping police offi­cers and way, way beyond.

His lat­est, Don­bass, comes across as the cul­mi­na­tion of a broad­er project of whip­ping back the fetid cur­tain on grass-roots injus­tice, a tac­tic the direc­tor has been refin­ing and expand­ing on in both fic­tion and doc­u­men­tary works. Unlike 2017’s A Gen­tle Crea­ture, about a woman enter­ing into a spi­ralling abyss of admin­is­tra­tive dou­ble-deal­ing in an attempt to see her impris­oned hus­band, this new film takes an absur­dist com­ic view of a coun­try in moral free fall.

Its exquis­ite corpse struc­ture pulls in sketch­es are that are loose­ly tacked togeth­er, with each one depict­ing a dif­fer­ent bald-faced grift being met­ed out by the pow­ers that be. But not only that, it’s an ode to the hud­dled, bray­ing mass­es who, in sheer baf­fle­ment, have to accept that the scales are not only weight­ed against them, but are crush­ing them from above. One aspect of Don­bass that makes it espe­cial­ly inter­est­ing is how Loznit­sa presents cor­rup­tion as a the­atre of the damned, show­ing how the aggres­sors are able to assume the role of some­one in pow­er in order to lend heft to their nau­se­at­ing exploita­tion tactics.

In the back­drop is the con­flict between Russ­ian-backed Donet­sk and the Ukraine, and all of the episodes here – some tan­gen­tial­ly, oth­ers direct­ly – look at the idea of how war is used as a cov­er-all excuse to abuse the work­ing class­es. If you’re not with us, you’re against us, is a con­stant refrain. One scene sees a man attempt­ing to retrieve his stolen car, only to find that its been com­man­deered by the mil­i­tary and he’d be sid­ing with fas­cists if he doesn’t offi­cial­ly sign it over to the army. Anoth­er depicts a lengthy dia­logue between a fast-talk­ing med­ical admin­is­tra­tor and the nurs­es at a hos­pi­tal where sup­plies are run­ning dan­ger­ous­ly short.

What makes Don­bass one of the director’s finest fic­tion fea­tures to date is the stark tone it strikes through shoot­ing these dark frag­ments through with a shot of heady real­ism. Only one sequence involv­ing a rau­cous wed­ding par­ty is a point­ed shift into the sur­re­al – all the oth­ers depict crazy sit­u­a­tions that all feel like they’ve been ripped direct­ly from the head­lines or have have been recre­at­ed with a mea­sure of true-to-life fidelity.

Some of these scenes are capped with a grim punch­line, oth­ers just spi­ral off into a para­dox­i­cal abyss. The strength of Don­bass is that it is unremit­ting­ly bleak, but brings a sense of lev­i­ty via its daz­zling whirl­wind of cin­e­mat­ic inven­tion. It’s unlike­ly that this will be Loznitsa’s final word on this pet sub­ject, but the prospect of see­ing how the mae­stro of mis­er­ab­lism fur­ther uncov­ers this ghast­ly soci­etal rot is cer­tain­ly a tan­ta­lis­ing one.