War zones are chaotic, but the logic of the Russian offensive on civilian targets confounds even those fighting them. We see a photo taken of Lévy with the legion weeks later, he can point to some of them who are already gone. There are countless shots of building skeletons, as well as several corpses. An elderly woman who demonstrates, desperately and defiantly, how she spent a freezing night in a chair in her bathroom, the walls opened to the cold by airstrikes. There’s the woman making Ukrainian borscht over a fire in her backyard, tending a wish that the war will lighten enough to see everyone for her 70th birthday. It’s never clear in the film how Lévy inserted himself into the Ukrainian foreign legion.īut the images he captures, as well as the testimonies from numerous Ukrainians, are striking and raw. His French narration trends flowery and pedantic (steelworkers are the “nobility of the proletariat” who “forged” victory trenches toured on the front are “that archaic habit of men”). Lévy’s strolls around the eastern front with a bulletproof vest strapped over a designer suit, and plays vox pop with Ukrainians with various shades of frustration or terror (many willingly tell their story or show off their dire conditions, both as a statement of fact and a testament to their resilience). Slava Ukraini, co-directed with Marc Roussel, does not necessarily counter those charges. Some have mocked the 74-year-old, born in French Algeria to a Sephardic Jewish family, for being a dilettante – a decadent, out-of-touch pop philosopher touring war zones in such conflict-ridden places as Bosnia, Darfur, Libya and Kurdistan. Lévy, a writer, philosopher and television personality ubiquitous enough in France to be known simply as BHL, has drawn criticism for the rigor of his methods (in one of his books, he seriously cited at length a philosopher invented as a satirical character by the writer Frédéric Pagès he later complimented the author for the persuasiveness of his creation). Lévy made his film, he says, to argue for a sense of urgency, and to showcase “the indomitable, untamable resistance, high spirit, courage, optimism of these people in spite of the ruins, in spite of the losses, in spite of the disaster”. But the fatigue was in the west, not in Ukraine.” Western audiences may have grown tired of reading about Putin’s unnecessary and cruel incursion on Ukrainian territory many might not even know the war is ongoing. “Normally after six months, eight months, one year, you are fatigued. “The big surprise for me was that there was no fatigue,” Lévy told the Guardian in a recent interview. And yet, life goes on – in Kyiv, children play and people casually chat as sirens blare. By mid-film, he’s embedded with an international legion on the frontline of the counter-offensive, facing drone attacks that nearly destroy one cameraman’s car. Lévy begins his journey in the shadows of the war – a shot of a stuffed bear left on an empty swing, a smudged church icon half-buried in rubble, plenty of destroyed Soviet buildings a woman wearing fatigues, pushing a stroller in heels (she tells Lévy she and her toddler live underground, for safety) mounds of sand in the woods which denote mass graves. The film plays as a war diary, each chapter a different location and a different tone, though all connected by a current of fury and defiance. The 95-minute documentary, Lévy’s second film on the conflict, traces the three-month arc of the Ukrainian counter-offensive through many of the occupied eastern territories, from Kyiv to Bakhmut, Lyman, Izium, Kharkiv and Donbas, culminating with the liberation of Kherson in November. Such is the collage of lasting images captured in Slava Ukraini (“Glory to Ukraine”), Lévy’s documentary filmed over 10 trips to the country: devastating, resilient, admirable, often infuriating, sometimes surreal, at times relaxed and even a little funny.
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