Many good actors star in the film embodying quite confidently and sometimes too convincingly the main heroic – in various senses – characters: militiamen, not-overburdened with moral principles female secretaries, Mafiosi, villains, vile killers, and love-sick deserters.
It seems that for a Ukrainian movie to increase its popularity in eyes of audience and potential investors requires quite a sonorous public resonance more than some special artistic value. Certainly, it would be possible in the classic case where two or three million viewers rush to movie theaters to watch some domestic genre film (like they do in Poland nowadays). Still, a movie is not simply entertainment, not only art, but also a potential social resonator, tester, etc. Ukrainian film producers since independence seem rather timid about touching on contemporary issues. Even when in 1997-1998 such films appeared on the screens, they avoided direct contact with audience by using complicated art codes: Mykhailo Belikov’s Holy Family because of an intently sophisticated form; Kira Muratova’s Three Stories due to its post-modern playfulness; Mykhailo Illenko’s The Seventh Route in connection with its extremely complicated allusions, and Roman Balayan’s Three Moons, Two Suns because of the fact that the Chechen
issue is not as close to Ukrainians as to Russians (they accepted the film much more lively!) Now Hryhory Kokhan’s film claims for a serious social resonance. It seems that for the past ten years after Kira Muratova’s Asthenic Syndrome (1989) there has been no other film in Ukraine to be so eloquent in a social sense.
A real shock and revelation (apocalypse!) await the audience at the very beginning when a three times repeated title DEAD END is suddenly replaced with the first frame – the flying Ukrainian flag that takes up whole screen. This tremendously strong and meaningful accent becomes a tuning fork for the whole film that in a frank and naive way reflects the unleashed consciousness of current, extremely lumpenized Ukrainian society. Moreover, it becomes its spokesman and leader.
Dead End is an innovative film for the Ukrainian film industry. It captures contemporary life right on the street and puts it onscreen. Our film industry has always been afraid of real times and places of action. And here the events develop in the background of the newly rebuilt bell tower of the Mykhailivsky Monastery and on the pavements of the main country’s street in repair: the hero tears off the blinkers from a beggar’s eyes: “Khreshchatyk eats your money!” He even deserts not from a shabby boat but from the Ukrainian Navy Hetman Sahaidachny flagship. Moreover, it happened almost during the Ukrainian-American joint maneuvers.
At the very end the film makes a snide remark about our glorious militia: Berkut men, as always, come too late to an accident venue, handcuff the hero’s hands, and hit him in the solar plexus. Period. End of the film.
And in accordance with the film script he just wanted to escape abroad.
Well, one cannot run away from oneself. It was destiny for such a Ukrainian film to be born: accumulating and shaping in some way, but frankly and openly, the consciousness, desires, and emotions of the “man from the street” with his hatred for both foreign cars and foggy ideologists; his mythologization of banknotes of which there are never enough; his calm and traditional dislike of enforcement officers; his deep diving into the only element uncontrolled by anybody: sex; his refusal to accept any ideals and symbols; his rosy dreams about the satisfied, warm, and generous world abroad, one that another flag is flying in films about it.
Hryhory Kokhan’s latest film is doubtless born of independence. It was impossible to shoot such a movie before. It is born of independence in various meanings of this word – now unclear, now inexperienced, now unexpected, now unpleasant – the word that we have not managed so far to obtain or use. Not only in real life but also in the movies. Not only in the movies, but also in real life.
