I’d been wanting to see the movie since shortly after the war broke out, when I first heard about it. A film about the Executed Renaissance was a stark reminder of what we could expect from any accommodations with the enemy.
I found a date through my Bumble app. She was a good match for me: Lynn, American, 29, a trained lawyer working for an NGO, taking a detour on her career path to do some good. She’d studied Russian and was working on her Ukrainian. For her, I was a local Ukrainian with good enough English to point out the nuances and contradictions all around. And I’m a philosophy professor. In her profile she lists philosophy as one of her interests.
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We met at a café in Kyiv’s Podil neighborhood, between my university and the cinema. We had an early dinner because by the time the movie finished most restaurant kitchens would be closed due to curfew.
We talked about politics and poetry – and, of course, the war.
I filled her in on the background of the film. The first decade of the Soviet Union, the socialist euphoria, the cultural revival, the backlash and famine.
Lynn quoted Yeats for me: “A terrible beauty is born.” She said it was about Ireland, its independence. She was of Irish stock. She thought Yeats might be relevant to Ukraine, but apologized if he wasn’t.
When we stepped into the cinema, she stopped abruptly. “You smell that?”
The Drone
Lynn closed her eyes and sniffed the air like a little rabbit.
“That’s my Proustian madeleine. Fresh-buttered popcorn. It’s the smell of the movie theater in the small town where I grew up,” she said.
“You want some popcorn?” I asked.
“No thanks. I don’t eat it anymore. It gets stuck between my teeth. And anyway, I stopped eating it in America when most theaters switched to fake butter. I’d be disappointed if it wasn’t real butter.”
Her easy demeanor changed slightly, as if admitting something about her body – like popcorn stuck between her teeth – were too intimate for a first date.
We rode out the awkward moment and took our seats.
The movie was called Slovo House: Unfinished Novel.
“I assume this is going be tragic,” she said. “Ninety percent of the Ukrainian films I’ve seen are tragic… and violent.”
The flippant way she said it annoyed me, but I tried not to show it. I tried to remember the last Ukrainian comedy film I’d seen. It was a while ago. About gravediggers.
I changed the subject.
“You said you were interested in philosophy. Which philosopher do you feel closest to?”
“You mean like who’s my favorite?”
As a philosophy professor, the idea of “favorite” philosopher seemed a bit cheap, like reducing a universe of ideas into a pop-culture icon. But I went along with her.
“Yes, your favorite,” I said.
“I don’t really have a favorite. I just put that on my profile to keep away guys who were all about small talk.”
“You want big talk?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
Another awkward moment saved by the lights going out.
The film was powerful from the beginning. Dense with drama, intrigue, jealousy and poetry. In 1929, at the naively ingenious suggestion of Ukraine’s best-known satirical writer, the Soviet authorities put all of Ukraine’s major young writers into the same new building in Kharkiv (then the capital of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic); as a result, they could easily listen in on all the writers’ conversations.
It’s a true story. And true to Ukrainian history, it ended in tragedy.
Deep into the film there was a tense scene: A woman, the movie’s femme fatale, is washing her clothes by hand, half-undressed and leaning over a washboard, taking her aggression out on the wet cloth. Someone in the seat behind me was munching on popcorn nervously. A man, the film’s antagonist, comes up behind the woman and tries to rape her. The crunching behind me crescendoed. The villain grabs the woman from behind. She fights back. But the rapist quickly overpowers her, so she turns the tables on him.
“Go ahead, give it to me,” she says.
The villain looks at the woman in front of him – legs spread as if to taunt him – and loses all desire.
The victim kicks her rapist away, mocking him: “You’re impotent!” she says with contemptuous laughter.
Meanwhile, behind me, I heard two women whispering to each other.
One of the women raised her voice and addressed the person eating.
“Is it possible that you’re chomping on popcorn like an animal at a stable trough in the middle of a rape scene?”
A man’s voice responded quietly.
“Excuse me, but why do you have to be so aggressive with me?”
“Why? Because my father died in the war and my husband is at the front right now. That’s why.”
The man had no answer to that.
I didn’t dare turn my head. But as soon as the film ended, I stayed in my seat in the dark to read all the credits. The woman who had made the comment left the cinema quickly with her friend.
When the lights came on, I stood up and turned around to get a look at the target of the woman’s vitriol. The man was probably in his late thirties. Older than me. He was a bit overweight and soft, sporting an intellectual’s goatee. He still seemed a bit staggered by the comment. Or maybe I was the one reeling. What have I been doing? Teaching? Writing articles? Fundraising? Bumble dates?
After the film, I didn’t feel like trying to seduce Lynn or even getting to know her better. Fortunately, there was the excuse of the curfew; I ordered a taxi for her. I live around the corner from the cinema, so I walked home alone.
I went to my bookshelf and tried to find a “favorite” philosopher. The one I had written my dissertation on, an ontological relativist by the name of Quine, had long left a rancid aftertaste in my mind.
Instead, I read some poetry by the protagonist in the film. The one who died tragically. Killed himself when he realized his ideals may have been worthless.
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