Issue 78 (2022) |
Danila Kozlovskii: Chernobyl (2021) reviewed by Frederick C. Corney © 2022 |
Inspired by the events surrounding the nuclear accident in 1986, Chernobyl (also marketed as Chernobyl. The Abyss and Chernobyl 1986) is Danila Kozlovskii’s melodramatic reimagining of a group of fictitious lives impacted by the disaster. Better known as an actor (Viking, 2012–21; Matilda, 2017; Dovlatov, 2018), Kozlovskii has produced and directed this current production, while also starring in the leading role of Aleksei Karpushin, a local firefighter and often reluctant hero in the unfolding drama.
Inevitably perhaps, all films about this disaster will be viewed in the shadow of the ambitious and powerfully executed HBO mini-series of the same title from 2019. Widely praised for its accuracy and drama, and particularly so by Belarussian novelist Svetlana Alexievich, whose brilliant oral history, Voices from Chernobyl (1997), provided source material for the film, it was roundly pilloried in Russia as “packed with petty anti-Soviet filth, which poisons viewers’ brains, thus becoming a deliberate, well-thought-out distortion of Soviet reality.” A prominent official TV channel threatened its own forthcoming Chernobyl series, supported by a state grant of almost half a million dollars, one that would identify a “CIA saboteur” who was behind the disaster (Tlis 2019; Shelepin 2019; Roth 2019). This is not the place to discuss that earlier production, which has undergone frequent and detailed autopsies elsewhere (Gessen 2019; Kokobobo 2022). Suffice it to say that Kozlovskii’s Chernobyl follows the former’s chronology and its major moments quite closely, but never exits its shadow. Thankfully, though, it is by no means a hack official Russian response to its predecessor.
Dedicated to the “Hero-Liquidators,” and filmed in Croatia, Hungary, Moscow, Zelenograd, and Troitsk, Chernobyl weaves a thin story of love lost, found, lost again, and ultimately (and somewhat grotesquely) redeemed. Set against the backdrop of the nuclear disaster, the film follows the melodrama revolving around Aleksei, his old—and recently reignited—flame, Olga (Akin’shina), and their ten-year old son, Lesha (Tereshchenko), of whose existence Aleksei has only just learned. Yet as the film itself spends little time or effort fleshing out the lives of Olga or Lesha, or even Aleksei’s relationship with them, there is little need to spend any time exploring them here. As such, when the tragic ending comes, accompanied by a redemptive and uplifting coda at the end, it is unconvincing and oddly unmoving. As in many a melodrama, the plot survives on suspensions of disbelief: Young Lesha’s miraculous recovery, Aleksei’s seeming immunity to the ravages of radiation poisoning until the very end, the incomprehensibility of Olga’s attraction to this man.
Overemphasis on Aleksei’s character in the film, replete with multiple tight shots of his anguished face, is at the expense of any other character development at all. Even the ostensibly pivotal engineer, Valerii (Avdeev), and the military diver, Boris (Nikolai Kozak), who accompany Aleksei on the heroic effort to stop the potential release of radioactive steam from under the core, are but foils to him, as is Tropin (Chernevich), the stolid party boss in charge of mitigation efforts in the reactor. This act of heroism takes up much of the final hour of the film, when it plunges into the depths of melodrama, as Aleksei, Valerii, and Boris (but really just Aleksei at key moments, and the only one who escapes the flooded tunnels) save the day by opening the valves to vent the coolant that is in danger of being released in the form of deadly steam across much of Europe. These scenes of melodramatic tension very nearly trade the context of Chernobyl itself for the celluloid tropes of the rescue film genre, evoking multiple earlier films, but mostly notably Titanic (1997)—or, for those with longer memories, The Poseidon Adventure (1972).
The reader of this review might wonder whether this film really has anything novel or fruitful to say about the Chernobyl disaster. It really does not, although it is not without its merits. Production values are good, and individual scenes are cinematically arresting. When Olga’s son, Lesha, sneaks away with his friends to visit the plant late that night, they become accidental witnesses to its fiery rupture. While presumably completely invented, this scene of the boys silhouetted against the inferno emphasizes their vulnerability not so much to the immediate explosion as to its consequences. The coming horror for them is implied, and is in a way more effective than all the explicit close-ups of radiation victims elsewhere in the film.
Chernobyl’s real merits are to be found, at least by this reviewer, in the film’s background rather than its foreground. One of the strengths of the HBO series, in my view, was that it meticulously argued that Chernobyl had been a specifically Soviet accident in key aspects. It made this case often in a directly prosecutorial way, by cataloging the pressures on the Soviet nuclear industry of specifically Soviet economic, political, and ideological realities (see especially Higginbotham 2019). In the same sense, Three Mile Island was a specifically American event, and Fukushima a specifically Japanese event. The HBO series was shot in dark and murky hues to convey this weight of the present effectively if heavy-handedly. Kozlovskii’s Chernobyl, by contrast, is brightly lit for the most part, its claustrophobic underwater sequences in the reactor plant thrown into sharp relief by this contrast. Soviet society is on display for all to see in this background.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Kozlovskii depicts the Soviet atomic city in ways which are highly reminiscent of the very intentionally textured and nuanced portrayal of provincial Soviet life in Andrei Konchalovsky’s superb Dear Comrades (Dorogie tovarishchi! 2020). Kozlovskii’s Soviet Russia is arguably even more devoid of ideological true belief than Konchalovsky’s, and real life is depicted here. This portrayal of late Soviet life is not without nostalgic overtones, as the tight family or work scenes focused on zakuski with vodka, and good-natured if rough camaraderie show. The Holy Trinity of food, booze, and friendship is on full display here. The posters of the latest Hollywood action heroes in the little boy’s room suggest a society with connections to the West. Slogans are often tossed out as shibboleths with little real meaning or thought. Aleksei is no New Soviet Man… or perhaps he is, just not in the originally imagined sense of that concept. He is a young, deadbeat male type instantly recognizable from any number of Soviet films of the glasnost era and after. Something of an anti-hero, he is a young man in pursuit of life’s fleeting pleasures, whether women, booze, or manly bonding. Clearly unable to sustain meaningful relationships, Aleksei comes unwanted back into Olga’s life, and is repeatedly unable to follow through on promises he makes to her and their son. He is redeemed only by the gift of life he gives to his son and by his own death that is the price for that gift.
Aleksei is in many ways a metaphor for the system, an extremely flawed man and reluctant hero, who is often forced into heroic acts reactively, much like the system was in the aftermath of the explosion. The Soviet system is often criticized slyly in this film. Aleksei’s easy trading of a video-recorder for a movie camera, and a bottle of foreign perfume for the loan of a car, suggests an economy of shortcuts through personal influence (blat). The deal he makes for his son’s life suggests a politics of expediency and favors in a medically underdeveloped society; his son needs to go to Switzerland for radiation treatment, Aleksei says, because the doctors are better there. Individuals are prevailed upon to undertake dangerous assignments not by any simple appeal to patriotism or ideology, but by a mixture of often implicit or explicit coercion and impossible rewards. The most explicit indictment of the Soviet system, though, comes in a conversation between Tropin and a nuclear technician, who is about to be brought before an investigative tribunal. Told to be silent and accept the board’s decision, the technician refuses to be a scapegoat, telling Tropin “we allowed it to be built in a way that it could blow up.” Tropin asks him who he thinks he is actually fighting against, telling him: “The system is like radiation. Everywhere and in everyone.” In a nod to past slogans about the longevity of Lenin (or Stalin), Tropin continues: “This is the way it has been and will always be. Stop acting like a child.” The technician responds: “But I am a child. A child of Soviet power.” This exchange would not be out of place in the far more direct HBO series. As for identifying responsibility for the accident, Kozlovskii takes a more humanistic approach than, it is implied, the impending investigation will take. As they are entering the flooded tunnels, Aleksei asks Valerii who was responsible for the accident, and Valerii responds: human beings. Aleksei asks who specifically, and Valerii says, “people, does it matter?” In an odd way, this exchange sums up the film.
It is hard to see how Putin’s Russia would find Kozlovskii’s film much more palatable than the HBO series it despises. What are we to make of Kozlovskii’s decision to close his film with old footage of a celebration at the plant filmed some time before the accident? Well-dressed and quite prosperous-looking atom workers smile as they applaud a singer giving a concert. At one level, it is of course intended to highlight the pathos of lost and damaged lives, as the camera pans across the audience. At another, it is hard not to see the very system that made the accident possible.
Frederick C. Corney
William & Mary College
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Works Cited
Gessen, Masha. 2019. “What HBO’s ‘Chernobyl’ Got Right, and What It Got Terribly Wrong,” The New Yorker, June 4.
Higginbotham, Adam. 2019. Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Kokobobo, Ani. 2022. “The Rise and Fall of Soviet Science in the HBO Series Chernobyl,” KinoKultura 77.
Roth, Andrew. 2019. “Russian TV to air its own patriotic retelling of Chernobyl story,” The Guardian, June 7.
Shepelin, Ilya. 2019. “Putin’s Media Struggle to Deal with HBO’s Chernobyl,” The Moscow Times, June 4.
Tlis, Fatima. 2019. “Russian Politician Calls HBO Chernobyl ‘Anti-Soviet Filth’, Falsely Accuses Producers of Distortion,” polygraph.info, June 17.
Chernobyl, Russia 2021
Color, 136 minutes
Director: Danila Kozlovskii
Cast: Oksana Akin’shina, Danila Kozlovskii, Petr Tereshchenko, Filipp Avdeev, Nikolai Kozak, Maksim Blinov, Igor’ Chernevich, Artur Beschastnyi
Producers: Sergei Mel’kumov, Aleksandr Rodnianskii, Danila Kozlovskii
Composer: Oleg Karpachev
Screenwriter: Aleksei Kazakov, Elena Ivanova
Camera: Kseniia Sereda
Sound: Aleksei Samodelko
Editor: Mariia Likhacheva
Production: Non-Stop Production with participation of Kinokompaniia Pereval
Danila Kozlovskii: Chernobyl (2021) reviewed by Frederick C. Corney © 2022 |