11/09/2024 - A Ukrainian family holidaying in Tenerife go from tourists to refugees overnight once the war with Russia breaks out, in Damian Kocur’s original second feature

l-r: Roman Lutskyi, Sofiia Berezovska, Fedir Pugachov and Anastasia Karpenko in Under the Volcano

Following up his successful Bread and Salt [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Damian Kocur
film profile], Damian Kocur has found an intuitive way to dramatise and create empathy for civilians surviving the Russo-Ukrainian War with Under the Volcano [+see also:
trailer
interview: Damian Kocur
film profile], his second feature, world-premiering this week in Toronto’s Centrepiece section. With the film’s title being the only thing it has in common with the famous 1938 novel, Kocur has selected it referring to the Canary Island of Tenerife, where an ordinary, middle-class Ukrainian family are holidaying in February 2022, only days before the full-scale Russian invasion.

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Kocur has previously cited Michael Haneke as a prime influence, and the photo-perfect nuclear family of the newly remarried Roman (Roman Lutskyi) and Nastia (Anastasia Karpenko), and the former’s children Sofia (Sofiia Berezovska) and Fedir (Fedir Pugachov), are not unlike the Austrian master’s recurrent “Laurents” – unknowing signifiers of bourgeois values, and perhaps complacency. Of course, this family are undeniable targets of our sympathy, although it comes at a gradual and hesitant angle owing to their relative privilege, and with an intelligent self-awareness from Kocur and screenwriter Marta Konarzewska that their peers choose easier and more uncomplicated identification figures in other war films.

So, Under the Volcano is a “trouble in paradise” film, like many before it, yet its building up of discord and peril is understated: indications of the invasion and rockets being fired towards major cities come from phone updates, and the parents look merely bothered, rather than stricken, although Lutskyi and Karpenko’s excellent performances convey far more anxiety under this façade. Being from a comfortable background in Kyiv, there are check-ins with parents and relatives who are fleeing internally for safety, whilst a sibling is immediately joining the Territorial Defence in Kharkiv. At the hotel itself, the concierge offers them an indefinite, complementary stay and food, whilst a similarly holidaying Russian family are guests as well, with tension between the two brewing in an offhand, and then aggressively, realistically sudden, way.

Sofia, who is very resistant to her new step-mother, gradually becomes the film’s heart, helping it develop more of an authorial connection to Bread and Salt. From an immediately pressurised opening, Under the Volcano drifts into a pleasing and paradoxically hypnotic kind of stasis, shot with oft-deteriorated available light and in shallow focus with long lenses – not quite a “hangout” movie, and more about biding time in urban loneliness (and Kocur somehow finds high, modern buildings and worn-down street lamps in his Tenerife location shooting).

Plot progression is limited, although the family’s fate as unlikely refugees finds its resolution. Yet this film isn’t a stealth “character study” either: it’s a naturalistic portrait of a moment in time, concluded in a surprising and lengthy scene where Roman and the maturing Fedir bond about the former’s past success in rap music. It’s a subtle way to say goodbye, with Roman likely volunteering for the war effort in Kyiv, and with the prepubescent kid both strengthening and hopefully temporarily pausing his connection with his father.

With the war entering its third full year, despite Ukraine’s robust defence efforts, the international calls for support are insisting we don’t forget; by showing us less-typical and maybe apolitical characters to relate to – the kind who might wish in an uncomplicated manner that Ukraine was as spiritually and legally European as their holiday destination – Kocur finds a way to keep the war in our minds, its aftershocks on the very edge of the continent on display.

Under the Volcano is a Polish production staged by Lizard Film, and co-produced by Hawk Art, MGM SA and TVP SA. Its international sales are managed by Salaud Morisset.