Cannes 2024 review: The Invasion (Sergei Loznitsa)

“With great integrity, intelligence, and acuteness, The Invasion shows how terribly hard it is day after day, on a country-wide scale.”

There is a sad but unrelenting logic in seeing Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa document the war currently wrecking his country, a consequence of the Russian assault launched in February 2022 (preceded by its annexing of Crimea in 2014). Back in 2013-2014, Loznitsa stayed for several months among the thousands of civilian demonstrators occupying Maidan Square in Kyiv to protest against the sudden capitulation of their government to economic and political threats from Russia, and shot there his documentary Maidan, which pictured the peaceful uprising and its bloody and deadly repression by the police forces. Two years later, in 2016, he used archive footage in The Event to recount the failed coup of 1991 which led to the chaotic transition from the USSR to the Russian Federation, and Ukraine’s declaration of independence. In this film, Loznitsa also showed that underneath the outpouring of joy that comes from the promise of democracy always lurks the danger of a return to the days of imperialism and terror.

For Ukraine, these days have arrived, triggered by the decisions of Vladimir Putin (who, like the first glimpse of a boogeyman in a horror movie, appears briefly in The Event, as he was an aide to St. Petersburg’s mayor at the time). And since the beginning of 2022, as he did on Maidan Square, Loznitsa has gone all around the country to film what life is like for the Ukrainian people under these dire circumstances. Made of a compilation of short films shot over the course of two years, The Invasion never goes near the front line, yet it shows how the war has penetrated every aspect of daily life. Thus, the movie title gets a double meaning: there is the invasion of the Ukrainian territory by the Russian army, and there is the invasion of the everyday life of civilians by the ripples of war.

We see young men in military uniforms getting married at city hall, tending to their newborn babies at the hospital, eating among the customers of an outdoor restaurant. We see collapsed buildings in the heart of the city, and bomb disposal experts working in the middle of the woods. And when signs of war are not visible in the vicinity, they are deafening: sudden explosions nearby interrupting a conversation, airstrike alerts abruptly stopping every human activity. One of the most distressing scenes of The Invasion takes place in an elementary school during such an alert, the occurrence of which makes us see how everything has been organized: there are classrooms and even a school canteen in the basement of the premises, in order to go on with the day almost as usual. What we also come to understand is that even on a ‘normal’ day, free of air raids, war and the resistance against the invader interfere with school time: the national anthem is sung before any other activity, and the curriculum of the classes, even at such a young age, revolves around the battles fought and their death tolls.

Elsewhere in the film, it is Loznitsa’s editing that reveals the invasion of everything and everyone by the spirit of war and death. One scene depicts how Ukrainian people massively return novels by Russian authors of all periods to their bookstores, to have them disposed of; the following scene pictures other civilians learning how to handle semi-automatic weapons and use them to shoot. The message could not be any clearer: books are replaced by guns. This echoes something a woman says about the psychological afflictions of her boyfriend, a war prisoner who has been released: “People think that once you’re out of captivity, it’s okay; not at all, it keeps being terribly hard”. With great integrity, intelligence, and acuteness, The Invasion shows how terribly hard it is, day after day, on a country-wide scale. And to quote another phrase from the film, one can only hope that all this pain and resilience, “this heroism which is choosing good over evil” will see victory in the end.