Berlinale 2024 review: The Editorial Office (Roman Bondarchuk)

“Roman Bondarchuk laughs, and his audience laughs with him, in the face of the utter collection of absurdity and tragedy the society he lives in has become.”

It all starts with a groundhog. More specifically an endangered species of groundhog, living in the steppes of Southern Ukraine, near Crimea (the film is set in 2021, just before the second phase of the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Yura, a young zoologist from the local town’s natural history museum, desperately tries to get pictures of this animal as a means to obtain European funding for wildlife conservation in the area. The opening shot of The Editorial Office immediately sets the tone of the film, full of dry sarcastic humour: we get to see the groundhog up-close, but Yura gets there too late from the background. What his camera captures instead is a serious crime: police officers committing arson, lighting forest fires for reasons that will be made clear later.

Yura’s determination to make the story public by bringing it to the press sets him on a surreal tragicomical journey in the vein of movies from directors such as Bruno Dumont (the steppe scenery bears a resemblance to the setting of his movie Flanders), Jafar Panahi (the film shows how, just like in Iran, censorship and harassment are the order of the day), and most of all Radu Jude. Like his Romanian peer, director Roman Bondarchuk laughs, and his audience laughs with him, in the face of the utter collections of absurdity and tragedy the societies they live in have become. Policemen have stopped helping citizens, people over 50 are left without jobs or decent pensions, electoral campaigns are conducted for a mayor who is in a coma without anyone knowing it, corruption has taken over every human interaction. In The Editorial Office, Bondarchuk shows these situations through the eyes of Yura as an ingenuous witness, and through the use of the same kind of fierce and outrageous satire as in Jude’s latest film, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World.

Don’t Expect Too Much from a Society in a State of War’ could have very well been an alternate title to the movie. We see desperate, broke people falling for bad cover versions of Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, mediocre crooks promising them they will make a fortune out of cryptocurrencies. Young women being literally chained at home by their rich and jealous boyfriends. Funeral parlors turning commercial competition into gang shootings (something filmed by Bondarchuk in a detached fashion reminiscent of the stone-cold humor of the series Barry). Poorly made deepfake videos picturing the nearly dead mayor dancing in public have him trending online. Most of all, we see journalism losing its mind and its honor, willingly downgrading itself to two ill-advised activities: flattering the powerful by writing blatant propaganda pieces, and intimidating anyone else through the menace of publishing unsubstantiated, accusatory articles. Because, after all, “nobody gives a shit about facts“; except Yura, who gets to see first-hand, day after day, how the truth is drowned in an ocean of lies.

For an impressively long period of time, each scene of The Editorial Office embodies its wonderful concept in the narration, the visuals, or both. Even when, in the final act, it takes a sudden and unexpected turn towards a psychedelic and ritualistic state along the lines of The Wicker Man – and maybe Brazil, as all of this could very well be nothing but Yura’s delusional mind trying to escape the bleak truth of the reality he lives in. This last chapter sees the film burn its bridges, most certainly because it faces the same dead end as its main character does. Both are caught between a rock (Russian troops are at their gates) and a hard place (everything in their country seems rotten to the core), without any hope of turning things around.

Image copyright: Moon Man filmproduction