“A formalistic masterpiece where the story exists as much in the background as in the coming-of-age drama at its heart.”

When a country is almost perpetually at war, like Russia arguably has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union, inevitably militarism starts to bleed into the edges of its society. War becomes normalized, a fact of life, like the sun rising in the morning. In Nastia Korkia’s masterful Short Summer, this quiet indoctrination and the way it affects a child for whom that rising summer sun still holds the innocent promise of playtime and adventure, has a chilling influence on the idyllic images of Russia’s countryside the film presents. Korkia has left the country, and now resides mainly in Germany and France, but the memory of her childhood in Russia during the Second Chechen War is well preserved in a formalistic masterpiece where the story exists as much in the background as in the coming-of-age drama at its heart.

Eight-year-old Katya (a disarming Maiia Pleshkevich) spends the summer holidays with her grandparents in their dacha, while the fact that the two adults are divorcing hangs over their short leisure time together. As they blow the dust off the furniture and get rid of the cobwebs, the sun lights up Katya’s world. She seeks out her friends, ready for fun and adventure. Doing all sorts of mischief, lazying it up in the sun, chatting about frivolous stuff like changing teeth, or foraging for mushrooms with her granddad. The countryside is a dream for her, and she doesn’t notice the signs of an ongoing military conflict, locked in as she is to the world of children.

But the signs are there. They are everywhere. It’s not just the news reports on the radio about Chechnya and its ‘terrorists’. It is the train laden with tanks and armored vehicles going by while she and her friends play football. It is the shrapnel that severed the leg of one boy’s father, which his old man keeps in a box with other war paraphernalia, like useless medals that don’t fix the permanent damage to your leg. It is the woman at the local registry who would like to get a death certificate for her son, sent off to yet another Russian war, and is faced with deliberate Russian bureaucracy to deny the undeniable truth. It is the impoverished veteran breaking into the dacha to find some food, a bone-chilling scene of hide-and-seek.

Short Summer slowly builds to this dark specter looming over the country, starting with the two boys stopping Katya and her grandparents’ trusted (and rusted) old Lada as they arrive at their summer home, play-acting soldiers at a checkpoint. Korkia never lays it on thick, even though these reminders of war are everywhere in her carefully composed shots. Background almost becomes foreground to her story about a disintegrating marriage and the influence this has on Katya. That influence stretches to the absence of her parents, which is never fully explained, although mental health issues are alluded to when it comes to her mother. Her father isn’t talked about; could he be yet another victim of some senseless war?

Korkia’s hand in visually shaping the film is nothing short of masterful, especially in the way she calmly orchestrates scenes. In one of them Katya’s grandad takes her to the market in town, and on their way back he stops at an apartment building and tells the girl to wait in the car. In a static shot from the other side of the building, a woman can be seen busying herself in her apartment, as we watch the old man climb the stairs and enter the building. Moments later he appears in the door of the apartment, greeting his lover passionately. It’s an exquisite example of Korkia’s sense of composition and blocking, a jaw-dropping scene of simplicity in visual storytelling.

Katya understands what is going on between her grandparents, even at her tender age. Grandpa doesn’t want to talk about it, deflecting questions about where he will live, but the simmering anger between the two adults is palpable even to a young child. The girl desperately tries to preserve the happier moments, digging in the soil to bury colorful summer flowers beneath a shard of glass in the hope that this little piece of happiness will still be there next summer holiday. If there is a next summer holiday. The dacha is up for sale, so this might be the last time.

That shard of glass, another great piece of symbolism, provides Short Summer with some of its most poetic moments, when Katya uses it to reflect the sunlight, as if to let a bit of brightness and joy into the world and make the growing darkness in her life disappear. This leads to the film’s most ambiguous and symbolic moment in the last shot, in which an open window and a bright light darting around a wall suggest either eternal darkness or ultimate freedom. It is a fitting ending to a truly remarkable piece of cinema whose formal rigor never outshines the tenderness of its protagonist, but brilliantly underlines the harshness of her world.