If tasked with making a map of Ukraine through its regional representation in contemporary cinema one would inevitably find that Kherson oblast is almost exclusively covered by films of Roman Bondarchuk. His sophomore fiction film continues to picture a pretty consistent image of it as a semi-magical territory where every marvel is mirrored by monster. The Editorial Office builds a more rational and social environment allowing to see the film in a wider context and possibly even connect this territory with the rest of the country. The most interesting thing about the Editorial Office, I would presume, is that the film gives an opportunity to talk about the ontology of reality it depicts and its own style as well.
It is quite possible that exactly due to its wider context, the place of action is determined as broad as ‘Southern Ukraine’. Narration starts, as in Volcano, with a long observational shot with no apparent human perspective behind it. There is, however, a living being inside the frame. It’s a marmot standing on its hind legs in the foreground while you can see an open jeep trudging through the sandy steppe in the background. While the vehicle carrying, presumably, our main character is advancing towards the stationary camera it could be said that the film will close its narration also with the marmot in the last shot. Such narrational brackets, especially minding film’s parable quality, could have easily led to another title, Tales of the Steppe Marmot, for instance. It is Editorial Office instead and that choice implies some other narrator.
Having waited long enough to let the jeep drive close, a furry animal hides into its burrow and passes the burden of narrational duties to our main character. He is indeed in the jeep. That’s Iurii, a bit south of thirty young man who works in a natural history museum. With his older friend and colleague (?) he is on a short field trip searching for the very same steppe marmot already presented to us, and to us only, in all its CGI glory. So, in the good old tradition of Ukrainian cinema the hero is once again (after My Thoughts Are Silent) unlucky in his search for rare species but finds something else instead . In this case, it’s the plot of the movie he finds when, after witnessing forest fire, he takes pictures of the arsonists.
On returning to the city, Iurii finds out that his colleague has mysteriously disappeared. The director of museum is too afraid to do something about photos of the arsonists Iurii brings to her. She hints though that the press might be interested in his story. The subsequent quest for justice by the Iurii’s character launches the main storyline: he finds a new job in Pectoral newspaper, meets the romantic interest Lera (Zhanna Ozirna) there and gets caught up in a small war between two candidates for mayor during the election campaign.
However, Iurii´s main characteristic would be be anything but proactive, even his sluggish movements across town in search for justice cause small whirlwinds of repressing activities from those who in power (and obviously somehow interested in forest fires): he’s getting sacked from museum, his appartements are searched by police in connection with the same case he’s trying to reveal to public. His mom, however, dates Ruslan, wheeling and dealing deputy mayor who’s now in charge basically of the whole town, especially since rumour has it that the mayor is in coma (it doesn’t stop the election campaign for his next term). Therefore, it would be very unlikely for him not to protect her son, especially when it is very easy to suggest that nepotism and corruption are inseparable characteristics of the environment he inhabits.
The borders of that environment are not the same as of the influence of some shady people like Ruslan. It is shown as pervasive as the air all characters breathe. The Editorial Office tilts, pans and tracks through it most of its time, taking the Pectoral newspaper office, where Iurii starts working eventually, as a centre of all action. It is both the starting point from where the main character goes off on a different quests and the litmus test solution to where he returns its results and sees the reaction. In many ways Editorial Office works similarly to Volcano, both being the series of loosely connected trips from the main base to the marginal loci and series of interactions with its dwellers.
It is here I find myself in a pinch concerning the Editorial Office. On one hand, I find this film quite inconsistent in its causal logic, its systems of social identification as grossly simplified and its plot as no more of a constellation of loosely connected scenes than tightly knit linear story it seemingly pretends to be. On the other hand, all these characteristics are pretty consistent themselves and provide some storytelling and interpretational opportunities . So I’d take these traits as an opportunity myself and try to see where they lead to.
For instance, Iurii status is never identified firmly neither when he works in the museum (museum of what? What is his job position?) or in the newspaper. More than anything this tactic can be compared to the functionality of main protagonists in US science fiction films of the 1950s dealing with atomic giant monsters or alien invasions. He (it’s always he) might have been introduced as a journalist or even private person with no obvious affiliation. However, eventually the plot required for his main hero to have a different set of skills and status to remain in a centre of action. So, it turned out that along with being a journalist he was also a great physicist who was able to find an answer of how to destroy the monster and build some μ-meson cannon. On top of that, when the time came for someone to pilot the plane for a final fight with a giant alien bird which now is preoccupied clawing UN headquarters in New York, it turned out that our main character was also an ace pilot. To ensure the character’s central position these films gradually gave them inhumanly vast knowledge and an incredible set of skills. The Editorial Office goes along the same ropes though in the opposite direction and without flaunting the technique itself. The aforementioned films were obliged to make the goals for its protagonists as clear as possible and hand them sufficient skills to achieve their goals. The main character in Bondarchuk’s film does not have goals as clearly defined. He is more of a witnessing hero. He accompanies others, he runs the errands for others, sometimes revealing absurdity of the errands themselves, but he’s not the action hero per se. That’s why his responsibilities within the editorial office and the museum before is a blurred spot so he could be sent into whatever mission film’s script or other character see as necessary.
All that makes the hero itself sort of a blurred spot as well, making possible a few readings of his character which, in different parts of the film, seem the most probable. His working space in the museum is wittily shown as a jungle where you almost can’t see people working there behind numerous pots with various plants. Changing his working environment from one that of a museum into a more dynamic one could symbolise, amongst other things, character’s coming out of vegetative state and gaining more active status onwards. Although it is really hard to say whether this change really happens. The film seems to be more treading on the idea that Iurii’s state at the beginning of the film is not of an apathy, but of existential disgust coupled with his sheer naivety. Such a combination seems absurd (disgust points to understanding the situation, naivety does not), nevertheless the Editorial Office is ridden with paradoxes like that. The same naivety of the main character in Volcano, Bondarchuk’s previous, was motivated by the fact that he was an outsider who didn’t understand the almost mythological environment he was stuck in. Iurii is definitely local and might have been depicted as a more fitting piece of local puzzle. He is not, however, and the basis for his refusal to embrace, accept or sometimes even to be aware of ‘how things really are’ in his town are hinted at in one of the earlier scenes where Iurii listens to Jonathan Livingston Seagull audiobook. That alone enables to characterise him not as a chunk of passive organic matter that gets tossed about throughout the whole film but black sheep of the fold or, to be exact, a Jonathan Livingston himself. Such intertextual connection gives him privilege to be read as different from the others, but at the same time the very choice of Bach’s book might point out that Iurii’s character should be taken ironically. His more sporty attitude in the second part of the film can be explained much more coherently by the fact that he is attracted to Lera who is the most proactive character in the Editorial Office. At the same time the film is not preoccupied with explaining her attraction to him which is motivated at its best as thinly. Lera’s character simply does not pay attention to any contradictions and nuances of his behaviour, bluntly acting in script-made-me-do-it manner. More often than not Lera is just the device to transport male character to different locations. Her non-functional presence in the final scenes, all bound to the same location so the transportation is not needed anymore, acknowledges her role almost overtly.
Nevertheless Lera played by Zhanna Ozirna is the only character in the film who seems to belong to its time, which, unlike the location, is defined very clearly. The Editorial Office is set in end of August 2021, half a year before the full-scale Russian invasion in Ukraine. Her character absorbs many new social meanings after 2014 to represent an emerging society which here, in the Ukraine’s South, is still not more than a loose net of connections on the margins of the consciousness of mainstream society. Aside from characters represented as valiant, thoughtful, socially conscious and acutely aware that the war is going on, the Editorial Office presents the rest as still largely guided in their actions by their digestive tracts. Systems of social interactions and their visual representations here look a lot like a certain type of popular Ukrainian film or TV-product especially produced by Kvartal 95 Studio (ironically, founded by now-president Zelenskyy) depicting reality from the point of brainlessly happy and endlessly consuming marketing manager who was himself (and almost never herself) mostly imagined figure. In a sense, Editorial Office could be perceived as parodying this media-reality, depicting it as an inversion of its tropes and evoking radically different style.
However, it is difficult to think of the Editorial Office in terms of a parody. Otherwise it comes dangerously close to its object: both have their characters to be rather flat and causal links oriented toward having only short-term effects, some of them causing many contradictions throughout the film. Arson scene, to take one instance, is functional in many ways. It basically starts the film story. When we learn the reason behind it, however, it is bedazzling. If the final goal of arsonists is wood then why start such massive forest fires around the city to effectively destroy what they set out to get? Information about the purpose behind forest fires is once again functional as motivation (however is absurd as an explanation of past events). It allows for characters to travel to a sawmill where burned logs turn into lumber. Pectoral’s editor-in-chief (Maksim Kurochkin), to take second instance, proposes Iurii work despite him openly stating of having zero experience and no skills needed to fill this position. And whatever reason we could make up for the editor’s reasons, it is still unexplainable why he is so enduringly patient in keeping Iurii in this position despite him ruining his every editorial task. Kurochkin’s character behaviour is also functional because it allows main characters to make all journeys and interactions needed. On the other hand, it is incoherent because it contradicts his principles on which he is very vocal making his character inconsistent. Furthermore, it gets most bizarre when Iurii finally decides to be the breadwinner for the family and travels with his colleague to blackmail a local businessman and deputy of the city council. This activity is sanctioned by editor-in-chief whose behaviour in this case seems particularly incongruous, minding that the same deputy belongs to a party in power which his newspaper serves and depends on. Such a bite of an arm that feeds him looks like an unexplained violation of hierarchies of power and systems of corruption shown here. All in all, the Editorial Office seems too good at reproducing the same chaos in the product it sets out to ridicule (meaning I´m trying to hold to that connection, of course).
If I’d still entertain the idea of parody, I should also look into the question of style of Editorial Office. It is quite obvious that its aesthetics are radically different from what one would typically see in the supposed object of parody. With its preference for long observational shots, allowing not to break actors’ performances by editing and gaining credibility to diegetic reality, Bondarchuk´s picture is clearly on the arthouse end of the cinema heap. Roman Bondarchuk and film’s DP Vadym Ilkov duo may do the whole dialogue scene with one wide shot (like the doughnut scene) which would be unacceptable for the object of the parody, who would slice the whole episode with shot/reverse shot sequences (which would require different amount of time and work). The choice of a style can be and should be seen as the ideological choice. The reasonings behind it may vary greatly, of course, and should include economical as well. Here, however, it doesn’t seem to add up to anything apart from qualifying as the art-film suitable for the film festivals. It doesn’t really centred on actors’ performances, nor does it builds credible diegetic reality being ridden with numerous causal gaps and presenting simplified social interactions. In the end, Editorial Office looks like a nightmare of a Ukrainian TV-producer from 1+1 channel shot by Terence Malick’s cinematographer (Sergei Loznitsa’s might be even better pick) in which his or her subconsciousness turns typical TV-product plot on its head revealing true motivations behind its glossy reality. Film’s balancing act between being awkwardly comical and plain awkward instigates a thought that the Editorial Office may not really pretend to depict reality ‘as it is’ at all.
The Editorial Office is almost obsessively insistent on showing media fakes in the process of making: as a product of election campaigns, paid news or tabloid journalism. Media-reality formed by TV and popular cinema in Ukraine of the 2000s and especially 2010s also can be understood as glass matte augmenting filmed reality to the everything-is-awesome degree. Editorial Office, consciously or not, raises the question of how reality itself can be turned into a media subproduct, some sort of some trashy reality show (attention to how reality mediated and why is a really interesting feature of several other recent Ukrainian films). The last mediated image in the film during its climax (the resurrection scene) can be seen as an example of such transition, first showing resurrection as truthful on a screen and then confirming it by film camera in the diegetic reality but turning out to be fake after all. If the uncertainty in this sequence of what is real and what not can be seen as an argument for understanding Editorial Office as a relativist or at least ironic film, the rest of the film speaks against it. It always juxtaposes faked reality with its truthful depiction, with main protagonists holding ultimate licence for capturing it in his photos or otherwise approving its veracity. The whole bunch of other characters deny this truth, try to silence it or fake it. Such juxtaposing is bluntly put and consistent throughout the most of the film contributing to the idea that it should be regarded as criticism and act of clearing the matte painting from the screen for us to see the truth. Even the magical spaces are doubled here, when our hero happens to be on the margins of the map. Any magic turns out to be no more than a trick when produced by antagonists.
This has an especially jarring effect on the Editorial Office. The principles behind Editorial Office diegetic reality reality begin to feel as guided by media-stereotypes, by ideological and economic reasoning (the question of language would be the most obvious but the most time consuming to look at) and turning it into a product almost indistinguishable from what it set out to unveil. The opposition between the truth by minority and fake by majority doesn’t really look coherent when you realise that the film cheats with both parties. It is most coherent if perceived as a fairy tale told by a steppe marmot, and one could hardly expect it to be ironic parody or campy self-parody and definitely not a truthful depiction of deeply corrupted society ruled by their stomachs when told by such a narrator. The closing scene, long, intricate and beautiful one-shot set ‘after the war’ is a sort of curtain call for most characters. It keeps the same farcical tone as the rest of the movie, but by showing moral elasticity and adaptiveness of antagonists it mostly acknowledges that Editorial Office is indeed rather a straightforward tale. This final shot is a curtain call for the marmot as well. Its reemergence along with may be the greatest gift of this film, pointing to the fact that despite the war and supposed destruction of much of its natural habitat it has also survived to tell this tale.
