A movie’s themes could hardly be more urgent and contemporary than those on offer in this entirely absorbing film from German director Isabelle Stever and Ukrainian critic turned screenwriter Anna Melikova. It’s a bulletin from the frontline of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and from the culture war too. It is about identity and choices made in peacetime when less was at stake. There is a bold and brilliant premise that may at first look artificially satirical but is actually inspired.
When Russia begins its attack, the crisis is very specific for a scared young Ukrainian couple, recently engaged: Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright). As bombs rain down, they head west in the cramped car of Olya’s elderly mum and dad – with Olya grumpily objecting to her dad’s sexist comments from behind the wheel about female drivers – to stay with Olya’s sister, who is married with a young baby and whose husband, to her fury, has joined up. Oleh’s plan is to get out of Ukraine and live with Olya in the safety of Germany and the EU.
But wait. No men between 18 and 60 are allowed out of Ukraine, yet the thing is that Olya and Oleh are a queer couple and Oleh is a trans man, though he hasn’t quite got round to telling his future parents-in-law this. Oleh’s humiliating plan is to swallow his pride and disavow his new identity at the frontier; to betray his own life choices; to demand exit on the grounds that he is really a woman. He even plans to produce his psychiatric certificate, originally intended to underscore the psychological validity of his female-to-male transition, but now to imply the opposite, that there is something crazy in suggesting he is anything other than a woman.
Stever and Melikova deliver the film’s sledgehammer punch in a scene showing the female Ukrainian border guards and their towering contempt for Oleh’s desperate cowardice. “You wanted to be a man so much?” they snap. “So stay here and be a man.” They are even more scornful when Oleh starts unzipping his trousers. “We don’t care what’s in your pants.”
Oleh’s ordeal of humiliation is linked to the advance of Putin’s forces, but crises of identity are detectable elsewhere. At the local market, a Russian-speaking woman, using the language natural to her and to which nobody objected before now, finds that there is a cold, hostile silence as she speaks. Someone shrilly tells her to speak Ukrainian, and it causes a general brawl in which Oleh sustains a black eye. Language, culture and identity are all combustible elements leading to violence.
Olya’s mum is philosophical and fatalistic about everything in ways that exasperate Olya; she has already accepted the problems in her marriage. But Olya’s sister is enraged – and on the verge of a breakdown – at her husband leaving her with their baby to join the army. And so far, this is how this very modern, anti-militarist, anti-war couple Olya and Oleh have always felt: their feelings for each other, their truth, which they have after all gone through a lot to achieve, are the most important thing. Not unreasonably, they thought that would be the great challenge of their lives. And the war exposes painful truths about Olya’s attitude to Oleh’s transition. It’s a terrifically well-shot, well-acted, uniquely challenging movie about a belief system in crisis.
• I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming screened at the Locarno film festival
