THE OPINION OF THE “WORLD” – WHY NOT
Sometimes the end of one war signals the beginning of the next. It is to this persistence in disaster that the latest feature film by Sharunas Bartas, 57, revisits a little-known fact of war in Lithuanian history. In 1948, in the wake of the Second World War, Soviet troops occupied the Baltic country and imposed a strong repression on the population in order to rapidly transform its social and economic structures. A resistance movement is organized.
In an isolated village, the old Jurgis Pliauga (Arvydas Dapsys), patriarch and landowner, leaves a small detachment of partisans to bivouac in a forest of his domain and provides them with food, while the foreign troops ransom him. His adopted son Unte (Marius Povilas Elijas Martinenko), a thoughtful teenager, is old enough to make a choice and, perhaps, to join the bush.
With At dusk, Sharunas Bartas confronts his cinema, usually intimate and meditative, with a larger historical subject, which he sifts through his long floating takes soaked in fragile half-days. The film shows a country and its population caught between the atrocities of the occupation army and the hasty methods of the partisan movement. The resistance he portrays is that of despair: undermined by its internal conflicts, seeing its ranks wither, soon crushed by superior opposing forces.
The film circulates between several characters, and especially among the small lame clan who live in the farm of Pliauga. A focus struck by misalliances and losses, which nevertheless reflects a fundamental history, that of the old class society that the Soviets overthrow. Bartas pays attention to each of them, immersed in a little theater of resentment that sometimes takes on Chekhovian accents. Like the character of Elena (Alina Zaliukaite-Ramanauskiene), the bitter wife of Pliauga, ruminating on her noble extraction and who lives on the farm like any other Cherry orchard by Russian playwright.
Unfathomable youthful gaze
To film this world on the edge of the abyss, the intimate focal length employed by Bartas does not always appear the most suitable, too narrow to embrace the movement of the story. The laudable desire to demystify the fact of resistance, to remove it from any form of heroisation, leads the filmmaker down the slope of overwhelm, the maquis here taking the form of a cul-de-sac, or even a to die, since all is already lost. In complete darkness, At dusk itself does not escape a certain despondency, a sinistrose which finds its place in the dreary Lithuanian winter plain.
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