Historically
speaking, Russia’s military aggression in eastern Ukraine is nothing new. Just
ask the Cossacks—if you can find any left. There is one particular Cossack woman
an elderly German man would dearly like to find. His connection to the Cossacks
is news to his granddaughter, but their family does not talk very much.
However, she might finally get to know the old man before it is too late in
Nick Baker-Monteys’s The Final Journey (trailer here), which screens
during this year’s KINO!: Festival of German Films in New York.
The
recently widowed Eduard Leander was always a prickly cuss, but when he suddenly
leaves on a seemingly inexplicable Ukrainian voyage, his daughter Uli still
feels duty-bound to dispatch his slacker granddaughter Adele to retrieve him
from the station. Much to her chagrin, Adele finds herself train-bound for Kiev
instead. Old man Leander is somewhat put out having her tag along, as is she,
but at least she finds some companionship with their hard-partying compartment
mate, Lew.
Of
course, once they reach Kiev, they realize his life is much more complicated
than he prefers to let on. Lew is ethnic Russian, but still identifies as
Ukrainian—as well as Russian. It turns out he is the only member of his family
with such divided sympathies. He was a Maidan supporter, but his brother Boris
has become one of the few fig-leaf separatists in Donetsk, providing cover to
the plain clothes Russian troops. However, those connections make Lew the
perfect guide for Leander as he searches for the mysterious Svetlana.
Frankly,
Baker-Monteys and co-screenwriter Alexandra Umminger are tepidly cautious in
the way they depict the fighting in Donetsk, preferring to cast it in
brother-versus-brother terms, as if it were not unlike the American Civil War, then
the conflict of neo-Soviet imperialism that it is. However, they clearly
address the repression and ethnic cleansing suffered by Cossacks like Svetlana,
whom we learn spent years in a Soviet Gulag (as did Leander, which is quite a
surprise to his family).
In
some ways, Final Journey is highly
formulaic, but that also means it will be very accessible to non-German,
non-Ukrainian audiences. In fact, one of its greatest merits is the appealing
chemistry that develops between Adele and Lew. Petra Schmidt-Schaller’s turn as
Adele is unusually subtle and earthy, while Tambet Tuisk is genuinely
charismatic as Lew. Oddly, veteran movie bad guy Jürgen Prochnow largely relies
on cranky old man clichés, at least until old Leander’s big third act pay-off.
Arguably,
Lew is the film’s most compelling character, but the Cossack back-story is
quite distinctive—and in many ways a tragically prescient prologue to the current
Imperial Russian war against Ukraine. Recommended for general audiences, The Final Journey screens tomorrow night
(4/8) and Tuesday (4/10), as part of KINO! 2018 in New York City.
