This lavishly produced historical epic about Ukrainian hero Hetman (or “leader”) Mazepa, who in the early 18th century briefly secured his country’s independence from rivals Russia and Sweden, is a willfully chaotic picture. Its merits, such as they are, lie in its very craziness, certainly not in its utterly confusing way of telling a story which, presumably, is familiar to Ukrainian audiences. The latest film from Yury Illienko, one of the most colorful figures of the long-gone Soviet cinema, is at best a curiosity, but on that level alone it could find further exposure at festivals willing to take a chance on a very wild ride.
Illienko is still probably best known in the West for his camerawork on Sergei Paradzhanov’s Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964), though he photographed and directed interesting films in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, many of them banned by the Soviet authorities. Though reasonably active in recent years, the director’s films of the ‘90s have rarely been seen.
Despite the obvious resources at his disposal, Illienko has chosen not to tell this story in any kind of coherent way, instead opting for an extremely stylized approach reminiscent, at its best, of Paradzhanov and at its worst (which is most of the time) characterized by an almost amateurish disregard for audience sensibilities.
The story is not told chronologically, but in bits and pieces through the feverish dreams of Mazepa, who sees himself at three periods of his life. Settings are deliberately artificial, and a lengthy battle sequence in the middle of the film uses copious amounts of obviously fake blood and plaster corpses. The freewheeling camera, operated by the director himself, never stays still for a moment, sweeping over the characters and action in dizzying fashion. The color grading varies wildly almost from shot to shot, from a very washed-out look to more normal color shadings.
The acting is all over the place as well, with most of the cast encouraged to overplay to an annoying extent. There’s a lot of declamatory speechifying and shouting over the din, all of it rather badly post-synchronized. Nudity abounds, and a climactic orgy sequence, which again seems to have no apparent purpose, is endlessly long.
Yet there are moments of strange beauty in the midst of all the cacophony, and the story, whenever sense can be made of it, is an intriguing one. Illienko, who is seen with his camera and crew in one sequence, has always been a maverick director, which is why his work was disliked by the Soviets. But his indigestible style here dooms what could have been an impressive saga; the pic will likely receive the most marginal international exposure.
