In “Porcelain Battle,” a resilient Ukrainian couple divide their time between two seemingly antithetical pursuits: When enterprising Slava Leontyev isn’t coaching fellow civilian troopers within the ongoing combat in opposition to Russia’s invasion, he and his associate Anya Stasenko are expert ceramic artists, casting and portray dainty porcelain collectible figurines impressed by native nature and folklore. If the title already suggests one thing pointed in that disparity, this emotive debut by Leontyev and American co-director Brendan Bellomo leaves nothing to probability in guaranteeing we get it: Porcelain, we’re advised, is “fragile however eternal, and will be restored after a whole lot of years.” Lest the purpose nonetheless be misplaced on us, the couple’s mixed voiceover later gives a blunter paraphrase: “Ukraine is like porcelain — simple to interrupt, however unattainable to destroy.”
The metaphor is evident sufficient, then; whether or not it’s fairly complicated sufficient to maintain a feature-length documentary is one other query. “Porcelain Battle” thrives on distinction, a lot of it poignant. Previous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Slava and Anya lived a bucolic life in rural Crimea, and the movie usually cuts sharply from gilded magic-hour footage of that idyllic current previous — rambling and foraging within the forest with their scrappy canine Frodo, diving into sun-lacquered lakes, crafting of their rustic cottage — and the chilly grey gentle of their present-day city existence in war-torn Kharkiv, the place they moved as an alternative of fleeing the nation altogether. There, his weaponry experience and her enduring dedication to creating artwork are framed as two halves of a united resistance effort: warfare balanced by love, bloodshed by magnificence.
Enamored of this theoretically unified dichotomy, Leontyev and Bellomo don’t peer too far into its conflicting on a regular basis ramifications, or its impact on the couple’s devoted relationship. Leaps between cozy footage of their home life collectively (full with the fragile, fanciful artwork that comes out of it) and queasy first-person fight footage from the Bakhmut frontline are jarring by design, lending this in any other case modestly conceived doc a brute affect that maybe helped land it the Grand Jury Prize in Sundance’s U.S. Documentary part. What’s lacking are the extra magnified particulars, the ethical and psychological fallout, of Slava and Anya’s extraordinary routine — now guided by a twin calling to create and destroy.
Leontyev presents his personal subjective wartime expertise with vivid sensory aplomb, the dynamically roving digicam (usually directed by his shut buddy Andrey Stefanov) accompanied by a fevered, clattering rating from DakhaBrakha, a self-described “ethic chaos” band based mostly in Kyiv. Much less simply articulated anxieties give approach to a concentrate on extra poetic beliefs and pictures. Tremendous porcelain collectible figurines of woodland creatures, their our bodies painted with complete bountiful pastel ecosystems, perform as a hopeful, even redemptive symbolic counterpoint to the carnage and peril of his present day job; for such small, valuable objects, they do moderately quite a lot of heavy lifting. Later, Slava and Anya’s abilities overlap to eerier impact when she offers a whimsical paint job to one of many bomber drones deployed by Saigon, his portentously-named navy unit of scrappy volunteers: We later see it in motion over pinpointed Russian foot troopers, a colorfully striped dragonfly of loss of life.
The filmmakers make copious use of digicam drones to seize these different drones in motion; the ensuing scenes of aerial warfare are each vertiginously spectacular and discomfitingly gung-ho. An completed visible results supervisor whose credit embrace the 2012 Sundance smash “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” Bellomo is attuned to the jolting sensations of fight each on the bottom and above it, and unsurprisingly sympathetic to his topics’ aesthetic passions. In a few artfully animated sequences, their artworks are introduced flowingly to life, although the impact is little greater than prettifying.
Bellomo isn’t, nonetheless, a sufficiently penetrating observer or interviewer to coax out the candid human doubts or fears that his two principal topics in any other case go away unstated, and their joint narration feels extra stoically inspirational than confessional. “It’s critically essential to smile every so often,” Anya says of their creations, additional explaining that she’s “making artwork for our time, for our nation.” However we principally see Anya in defiantly smiling, hopeful mode; the movie’s portrait of a wedding in wartime is touching in its depiction of mutually supportive affection, but any extra anguished intimacy beneath making an attempt circumstances is saved out of view.
It’s when the movie’s consideration turns to cameraman Stefanov {that a} rawer perspective emerges. A former painter who, not like his mates, feels unable to provide artwork amid such turmoil, he relates over a number of devastating minutes the ordeal of driving his spouse and two daughters to the security of the Polish border, narrowly securing their passage within the face of dire site visitors queues, fuel shortages and Russian shelling, and being permitted solely essentially the most cursory of goodbyes because the border gates closed. It’s a disproportionately harrowing testimony for its sidebar positioning in proceedings. Likewise, his desolate considerations that the separation will endlessly have an effect on his bond together with his youngsters hit more durable than Anya’s parallel commentary — laid over pictures of a pristine porcelain mollusc — that “a refugee is a snail and not using a shell.” In “Porcelain Battle,” the fact of dwelling in a shattered nation tends to outweigh any accompanying metaphor.
