Butterfly Vision

Bachennya metelyka

Filmfest Munchen

VERDICT: Maksym Nakonechnyi’s carefully calibrated drama about a young Ukrainian woman soldier who returns home in a prisoner exchange, tortured and pregnant, projects a more human, less heroic view of the Ukraine-Russia war while it affirms a woman’s right to choice vis-à-vis maternity.

Butterfly Vision (Bachennya metelyka), which bowed in Un Certain Regard at Cannes and is now traveling between Munich and Karlovy Vary, is a significant film on a number of levels. Blurring the line between a wartime drama and a personal one, it dispenses with rhetoric, both patriotic and gender-ideological, to convey a young woman’s courage under fire, under torture and under family pressure, to do what she sees as her duty – the right thing. The first feature film directed by Maksym Nakonechnyi, it is a mature work that has its own ethical and moral approach to the actions of its heroine Lilya, played with memorable calm and self-possession by actress Rita Burkowska.

It is refreshing to step away from stereotypes and watch a war story of wider import, but it may not be immediately apparent to many viewers that the action is set years earlier when Donbas was on fire and volunteer units like Lilya’s fought for Ukraine. (Later, when cities are shown intact and without a trace of bombing, it becomes obvious we are not in 2022.)

Another revelatory scene that cues the early timeframe occurs when Lilya boards a small city bus and the driver refuses to honor her veteran’s pass to ride for free. Not only that, but almost everyone on the bus agrees with him, and many make hurtful insinuations about Lilya’s contribution to the war. The girl gets off with dignity, her emotions perfectly under control – like a soldier, in fact.

Though it overturns what have quickly become our expectations for a Ukrainian war film, Butterfly Vision does have an obvious link to the meditative work of Valentyn Vasyanovych, whose Atlantis and Reflection introduced audiences to the tortured bodies and minds of combat veterans and the need for deep self-therapy (mimicked in various film elements, as here) to tie the broken inner threads back together again. Here the screenplay written by Nakonechnyi together with Irina Tsilyk (whose documentary shot in Donbas, The Earth Is Blue as an Orange, provided the bones of the story) uses the metaphor of a butterfly/drone soaring over scorched earth to suggest Lilya’s “vision” of the war and her place in it.

The other recurring metaphor that visualizes her deeply hurt female psyche, PTSD and other after-effects of combat is her own strong young body covered with tattoos, welts and scars. Each revelation–for instance, when she examines her back in the bathroom mirror–makes one wince; it is unnecessary for the director to show more than almost subliminal flashbacks to the torture she has undergone, when the after-effects linger on so physically.

“Butterfly” is the code name Lilya goes by in her work as an intelligence officer in aerial recon; she’s an expert at flying drones and gathering strategical information, like the location of camouflaged Russian tanks. Among her fellow combatants is her recent husband Tokha (Liubomyr Valivots), who was some distance away and watched her being captured by Russian troops. After being held captive for several months, she is freed in a prisoner exchange on a bridge. Later in a military hospital, Lilya receives confirmation of what she must have suspected: she’s pregnant by one of her rapists. Her husband doesn’t take the news well: “I should have shot you like you asked” (to keep the Russians from taking her prisoner), he curses. But he (like the doctors) assumes she will have an abortion and that will be the end of it.

Lilya’s choice is so unorthodox that it catches even her military mentor and close friend “Magpie” (Natalka Vorozhbyt) off guard; only her mother, who asks no questions, is delighted about the baby. Lilya’s own feelings are never openly expressed, only inferred by her last-minute refusal to abort and her increasingly strained relations with Tokha. Valivots’ skillfully ambiguous performance gradually reveals the wiry young man to be the headless member of a right-wing militia, which in one harrowing scene violently attacks a Roma camp in the woods, killing a person, while he stupidly records their exploits on social media. Demobilized, confused, and armed to the teeth, he is bad news but at the same time a victim of war just like Lilya.

In her second major film role after Parthenon (Venice 2019), Rita Burkowska affirms her ability to command attention, seemingly almost without trying. One admires her low-key self-control on screen that forces the viewer to look closer and infer how emotionally difficult it is for her to deal with the child within her. In the end Lilya is a deeply believable character as well as a true patriot, and her exclamations of “Glory to Ukraine!” ring thrillingly true.

Her alienation from the world is instead visualized in surreal dream sequences and, less clearly, in the superimposition of satellite targeting and pixelated drone images, multiplied a little too obviously by shaky hand-held TV footage and cell phone video. The harsh, atonal scraping of composer Dzian Baban is instead surprising effective in externalizing the anger and pain in Lilya’s soul.

Director: Maksym Nakonechnyi
Screenwriters: Maksym Nakonechnyi, Irina Tsilyk
Cast: Rita Burkovska, Liubomyr Valivots, Myroslava Vytrykhovska-Makar, Natalka Vorozhbyt
Producers: Darya Bassel, Yelizaveta Smit
Cinematography: Khrystyna Lizogub
Production design: Mariir Khomiakova
Costume design: Sofia Doroshenko
Editing: Ivor Ivezic, Alina Gorlova
Music: Dzian Baban
Sound: Vasyl Yavtushenko
Production companies: Tabor in association with MasterFilm, 4 Film, Sisyfos Film Production
World sales: Wild Bunch International
Venue: Munich Film Festival (CineVision competition)
In Ukrainian, Russian
107 minutes