Achrome is an art term referring to the absence of color, and employing it as a film title alerts viewers to two things. Not only to the stunning, extremely desaturated cinematography they are about to see courtesy of DP Anton Gromov, but to a film whose approach to the atrocities of war tends to place aesthetics over subject and striking images over its general lack of action or incident. Achrome (Pryzrachno-Belyi) is more likely to entrance hard-core festival fans, who will appreciate its painstaking technical construction, than to break out to wider art house audiences.
In her second feature, Russian director Maria Ignatenko further explores a poetic space of dreams and fantasies which often leave reality behind, as she did in her 2020 debut In Deep Sleep which bowed in the Berlin Forum. But in this IFFR Tiger competition entry, instead of talking about a young man accused of murder, she confronts the collective tragedy of the Second World War in the Nazis’ massacre of Jews and peasants somewhere on the eastern front (a clue that only some audiences will get: the local characters are speaking Latvian.)
The story follows Maris, a poor guileless simpleton. In the opening scenes set in a humble farmhouse on a hill, the 30-year-old Maris (Georgiy Bergal) lives peacefully with his elder brother Janis (Andrey Krivenok) and his wife Anna. His sensitive face and shaved head sometimes make him hard to distinguish from his equally shaved and gaunt brother. In this poor but loving home, lit by a weak oil lamp that leaves most of the frame in velvety darkness like a Renaissance painting, Maris feels protected. He’s too clueless to balk when Janis takes him along to enroll in the German army, docketed in an old monastery of simple, stark lines and ethereal beauty, and whose shimmering light conveys a sense of deep spirituality. The recruits line up in its low-vaulted crypt and, after giving an officer their first name and age, swear in God’s name their loyalty to Adolf Hitler.
This daring parallel between the Church and the Nazis, and the controversial participation of local people as mercenaries, is presented without comment. There are no titles in the film to explain what we are watching: the Wehrmacht’s tragic invasion of the Baltics in 1941 and their mass murder of the Jews with the aid of local collaborators, all detailed in Lithuanian writer Ruta Vanagaite’s 2016 book which inspired the screenplay. The film’s lack of a precise setting seems like a deliberate choice, however, that dovetails with other elements, like its esoteric atmosphere out of time and the camera’s emphais on Maris’s sculpted features to express the universal suffering of mankind.
Perhaps the main point is that, among so many callous murderers, there were a few like Maris who found a gun in their hands by mistake. His first shock comes when he finds the soldiers taunting a group of refugees – Jewish, to judge by their names, and mostly women – who have taken shelter or been rounded up in the monastery. A young woman, Leah (Klavdiya Korshunova), rejects the advances of a soldier and he punishes her in a room where meat is hung, until Maris later intervenes.
This is one of those films that does everything possible to eliminate dialogue, with the result that the actors have to mime their missing lines. Bergal walks an instinctual tightrope, at one point running away from the monastery like a child and docilely being carried back to the slaughter in his brother’s arms. The final long take holds on a mass grave where uniformed German soldiers jokingly pose amid the cadavers for an unseen cameraman. It’s a startling shot and highly effective, but allowed to go on much too long.
Visually there is a lot to admire here in the pared back camerawork and editing and the wintry Baltic landscapes disappearing in a mist of diffused lighting. No music interrupts this reverie from a timeless world, where only Roman Kurochkin and Andrey Dergachev’s the careful use of offscreen sounds break the silence.
Director, editor: Maria Ignatenko
Screenplay: Maria Ignatenko, Konstantin Fam based on a book by Ruta Vanagaite
Cast: Georgiy Bergal, Andrey Krivenok, Klavdiya Korshunova, Nadezhda Zelenova
Producers: Konstantin Fam, Egor Odintsov
Cinematography: Anton Gromov
Production design: Lyudmila Duplyakina
Costume design: Zlata Kalmina
Sound design: Roman Kurochkin, Andrey Dergachev
Production companies: Ark Pictures (Russia) in association with Black Beast Media Studio (Belarus)
World sales: La Distributrice de films
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (Tiger competition)
In Russian, German, Latvian
96 minutes
