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‘The Invasion’ Review: Sergei Loznitsa’s Raw but Restrained Reflection on Life During Wartime
In 'The Invasion,' leading Ukrainian docmaker Sergei Loznitsa focuses less on warfare than on the everyday struggle of living through it.
A recent Cannes premiere now making the festival rounds, “The Invasion” is hardly first to the topic: This year alone has seen an Oscar win for Mstyslav Chernov’s “20 Days in Mariupol,” while Sundance winner Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev’s “Porcelain War” and Oleh Sentsov’s GoPro battle study “Real” join Loznitsa’s latest in the Karlovy Vary lineup. “The Invasion,” however, doesn’t set out to immerse viewers in the chaos of armed warfare, instead offering a view of everyday life continuing (in frequently compromised, disrupted fashion) through the conflict: weddings, funerals, religious gatherings, school classes, hospital sessions, and so on. Amid the pomp and ceremony and group prayer, with mourners proceeding to the city’s politically auspicious Independence Square after the service, it’s hard not to focus on the soft, shattered faces of the pallbearers: barely grown men, some of them, reckoning with the value and fragility of their own lives.
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