To put it bluntly, Ukraine’s recent history has been tumultuous. After breaking away from the former Soviet Union in 1991, the country has continued to assert its independence to mixed results, a task which grew even more complicated in early 2014 when, after the Maidan revolution, Russia controversially annexed Crimea. In the aftermath, Ukraine has, in certain regions and cities, remained in a continuous state of unrest and violence. The inherent anxiety of this reality is exactly the tension which the new documentary “Close Relations” attempts to unpack.
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Director and narrator Vitaly Mansky (“Under The Sun”) endeavors to take a close look at the regular people caught up in this ambiguous wars of nations. The regular people for this particular project happen to be his family, which has been divided over and again by the shifting borders and nationalities associated with living in a former Soviet state. Born and raised in Ukraine prior to 1991, Mansky eventually went to university in Russia and settled there after graduating. He was there when the Soviet Union collapsed and Ukraine became an independent nation; suddenly, Mansky was no longer Ukrainian. He was a Russian.
Similar realities unfolded for many in his family —no matter what country they felt allied with, they were forced to redefine their identity after the split. For some, Mansky deftly explains, liberation and westernization came naturally. But for others, it did not; one relative died recently clutching a treasured photo of Stalin. In a way, “Close Relations” is a portrait of a year of chaos and political upheaval in an already volatile political landscape through the eyes of those on the ground.
Mansky’s method for capturing all of this is to travel back and forth across Ukraine over the span of a year, interviewing his extended family and often just letting them converse. It comes off as a laid back, grounded approach, but too frequently the conversations —unfiltered as they mostly seem— are tangential and circular. More often than not, his relatives do have something to say, and sometimes what they have to say is an articulate morsel worthy of consideration. The problem is that Mansky doesn’t ever give these ideas any room to be expanded upon. Instead, he lets the moment pass and the conversations continue, and the audience is once again sucked into a spiral of thought.
And this is an argument not at all critical of the subjects of his film and their varying and steadfast beliefs, but rather of the lethargic editing on display. Certainly after filming around Ukraine for over a year, Mansky had a wealth of material, but nonetheless, it still feels as though he indignantly insisted that every conversation run its natural course. Somewhere buried in this mess of excess is something resembling a thoughtful meditation on the current state of Ukraine, the multi-generational identity crisis, and the culture of military conscription.
Two of the finer moments of “Close Relations” are focused on this latter detail; two young men in Mansky’s family are nearing the age of conscription and wrestling with their feelings on the matter, which, in part, includes whether or not they believe in the current battles the country is fighting. While these scenes make up a small portion of the film, Mansky, in his narration, returns time and again to the idea. In a way it serves as a reminder of the fact that, for such a young country, Mansky’s film is almost completely devoid of young people. Which isn’t necessarily a complaint — certainly Ukraine’s elder generations are the worthy subjects of such docs — but there is the restless feeling that Mansky wants to say something about the future of his former land, and it seems hard to do that without looking more firmly at the next generation.
“Close Relations,” at 112 minutes, is severely overlong, and, at times, undercooked, rotating around the same ideas over and over before allowing any forward motion. But buried at its core are some fascinating characters and some truly thoughtful and nuanced notions about identity in a global age, what it means to belong to a country, and, ultimately, what it means to be family. Certainly it is not Ukraine’s definitive documentary, but “Close Relations” never fails to ask brave questions and give voice to a people who are, unfortunately, going unheard. [C]
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