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Washington Post Foreign Service
Front Page, Style Section
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.
Wednesday, October 2, 2002; Page C01
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KPnews.com photo |
KIEV, Ukraine
The climactic scene of Ukraine's first real epic movie features the Russian
czar Peter the Great and the Cossack hetman, or leader, who betrayed him,
Ivan Mazepa, drinking toasts at a surreal bloody banquet as the Battle of
Poltava rages around them.
"Thank you, great tyrant, for destroying Ukraine!" cries Mazepa.
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A crazed Peter leaps across the table and seizes Mazepa's face. "I will tear
your mouth, you stinking dog!" Then he turns to his troops. "Soldiers! Kill
all Ukrainians! For the Czar!"
"A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa," Ukraine's biggest-budget feature film since
the nation declared its independence in 1991, boasts little of the subtlety
of highbrow post-Soviet cinema from Russia and none of the escapism
mass-produced by Hollywood. It will not stir young girls like "Titanic" or
young boys like another "Star Wars" installment. Yet it is stirring a
national dialogue about what it means to be Ukrainian in a country that
never really was a country until just 11 years ago.
Mazepa, as every Ukrainian knows, is famed for switching sides during
Peter's long-running war with Sweden in exchange for a promise of Ukrainian
independence -- only to watch the Russians crush that dream, along with the
Swedes, at Poltava in 1709. For nearly three centuries since, Mazepa has
been reviled in Russian and Soviet history books as the ultimate traitor.
But now that his own people finally enjoy the freedom he failed to win, he
has been rehabilitated. In perhaps the ultimate honor a new nation can give,
Ukraine put his face on its currency.
It was probably inevitable, then, that he would be the subject of Ukraine's
most ambitious attempt at grand filmmaking to date -- and perhaps just as
inevitable that the movie would so infuriate Moscow that it has been
effectively banned in Russia. For Ukraine, "Prayer" has become part of the
ongoing search for national identity in a place still rediscovering a
history wiped out by generations of foreign rule.
"The film doesn't give any answers to the audience," said Philip Illienko,
son of the film's director, Yuri Illienko, and one of three actors who play
Mazepa. "I think it states the questions and each person who sees the film
has to make up his mind: Who was Mazepa and what was his role in Ukrainian
history and what is Ukraine's place in Europe and the world?"
Yuri Illienko's view of Ukraine's traditional place becomes clear at the
start of the film, as his Mazepa displays a map of Europe in the shape of a
woman, her intimate area placed in the east where Ukraine is today. The
metaphor of Ukraine as a woman raped repeatedly by invaders persists
throughout the movie's often-graphic sexual imagery. Mazepa, in Illienko's
view, represents what might have been, the nationhood Ukraine was denied so
long ago and achieved so belatedly.
Illienko, 66, a longtime director who made several movies that were banned
during Soviet times, has wanted to make this film since the 1970s but could
never do so as long as Russians ruled. He argues that had King Charles XII
of Sweden beaten Peter the Great at Poltava and kept his deal, Mazepa would
have been remembered as the George Washington of Ukraine.
Instead, Peter heard Mazepa was plotting against him and took his vengeance
by slaughtering thousands of Ukrainians at the hetman's home base of
Baturyn, sending their bodies floating down a river to intimidate Mazepa's
soldiers from following his lead. With the Cossacks thus split and
dispirited, Peter went on to defeat Charles at Poltava in what became the
pinnacle of the czar's reign, establishing Russia as a great European power
for the first time.
Mazepa, on the other hand, died in disgraced exile; only in 1992 did the
Ukrainian Orthodox Church remove the anathema, or curse of damnation, placed
upon him by Peter's order, and only in 1999 were his remains returned from
Romania for burial at Baturyn.
Illienko put together "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa" only by enlisting the
help of the post-Soviet government, which contributed a share of the $2.3
million production costs, a fortune by Ukrainian standards. The government
also contributed the film's lead actor, Bohdan Stupka, a former minister of
culture. The movie debuted at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and
premiered in the United States at a showing at Harvard University in August.
After months of hype and debate, it hits the screens in Ukraine for the
first time this month.
"Prayer" may confuse foreign audiences. It is not a linear narrative
intended to represent reality, but rather a 152-minute "phantasmagoric dream
of history," as Illienko put it, a circus hall of mirrors in which
characters and scenes are twisted, warped distorted. The special effects are
comically crude, almost as if in a stage play -- a tide of red paint to
represent blood, porcelain statues mixed in with real actors to represent a
battlefield of corpses.
Mazepa dies and comes back to life several times, in one form or another.
Characters are raped, decapitated and tarred and feathered. The portrayal of
Peter is particularly brutal; he comes across as a stark raving madman who
sodomizes one of his own soldiers in the opening sequence. Mazepa does not
always seem a font of sanity, either, with much of the movie focusing on his
sexual appetites, including an affair with his goddaughter.
Reviews have been predictably mixed. Variety, the bible of the American film
industry, panned it. While finding "moments of strange beauty in the midst
of all the cacophony," it complained that Illienko had shown "an almost
amateurish disregard for audience sensibilities" and declared that "his
indigestible style here dooms what could have been an impressive saga."
Yuri Shevchuk, a scholar who teaches Ukrainian at a Harvard summer
institute, described it as "a kind of Freudian foray into the human psyche,"
though he too lamented that it was not a more reality-based portrayal akin
to Mel Gibson's "Braveheart."
Yet he wrote that the desire for entertainment "does not override the desire
to understand exactly why Ukrainians seem so doomed to relive the same
national failure over and over again." The relationship between Peter and
Mazepa "is the key to understanding the centuries-old relationship between
Ukraine and Russia. Not incidentally, love and passion in Illienko's film go
together with death and decay, domination and control, humiliation and
murderous insanity."
The unhappiest reviews have come from Russia, where the government has
advised movie houses not to run it. "The Ministry of Culture believes this
film is anti-Russian and turns the known history of Russian-Ukrainian
relations on its head, and therefore does not recommend that it be shown in
Russian theaters," Culture Minister Mikhail Shidkoi announced in July.
Even some prominent Ukrainians have expressed discomfort with the film and
its ramifications on relations with Moscow. Viktor Pinchuk, a leading
businessman and the president's son-in-law, said he had not seen it but was
disturbed by what he had read. "This kind of interpretation of Russian
history, I don't like it," he said in a recent interview.
Philip Illienko, the actor and director's son, said people have overreacted.
"This is not an anti-Russian film," he said. "This is an anti-imperialist
film. The imperial part of Russia, they sure will not like it. But it
doesn't insult Russia itself."
As for the dark themes, he said, "Most of Ukraine's history is a dark one
and I'm not sure we are now coming through a bright period. But the [Mazepa]
period was a moment when our nation had a chance to throw off the yoke of
Moscow and to become really independent. In our history we had only a few
chances to do so. And only the last time did we manage to do so."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29878-2002Oct1.html
ArtUkraine Information Service (ARTUIS)
Washington, D. C. and Kyiv, Ukraine
ArtUkraine@starpower.net
http://www.ArtUkraine.com
"The Art of Ukraine's Long Struggle for Independence and Statehood"
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