By JOÃO LANARI BO*
Commentary on the film, “Air”, by Aleksei German Jr.
The war in Ukraine, launched by Vladimir Putin, has countless consequences on a human level — tragedies and tragedies that circulate in the ephemeral cycle of sensationalist news, of rapid consumption, configuring an (almost) routine for the perplexed spectator.
On the cultural front, another uncontrollable phenomenon has come to light — the cancellation of any Russian product from the consumer circuits, with the exception of the very rare exceptions that are customary. One of these occurred on August 23, at Cine Brasília, in the country's capital: the screening, in a session promoted by the Russian embassy, of the exceptional Ar (2023), by Aleksei German Jr.
Ar It is a war film, about the “patriotic war,” as the Russians refer to World War II. It is 1942, on an airfield near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg). Fighter pilots are facing superior German rivals, Russian planes are slow and precarious, even their radios are worse than those of the Germans.
What’s new: a squadron of women, recent graduates from flight school, with no real combat experience, joins the group. Katya comes from a small village, Masha from a prosperous Moscow family, Marika is Georgian. Zhenya, whose past is revealed throughout the film, is the daughter of a heroic pilot who was killed in Stalin’s purges a few years earlier (her mother was also executed). She was forced, like so many others, to deny her father as an “enemy of the people”: taken to an orphanage, she was raped by the inspector.
The action begins on the shores of Lake Ladoga, with a brutal bombing of a supply convoy from besieged Leningrad. Hitler's hope was to suffocate and liquidate the city with minimal losses to his country's forces. From September 1941 to January 1944, there were some 870 days of almost complete siege, which led to the deaths of more than a million people, a third of the population. Taking flight to try to prevent the massacre of the convoys was vital.
The images have a grayish-beige tone, characteristic of the director. A persistent fog diffracts the air, regardless of the time of year and the geographic location to which the war takes the squadron — and the effect is a subtle distancing, living people seem to have come out of old, faded photographs.
The film has six major aerial combat episodes. Initially, real aircraft were to be used, including the Soviet Yak-1 and the German Messerschmitt and Stuka models. Originals of these models are available in the Czech Republic, but it was not possible to use them. The option was to use modern aircraft “made up” by computer, and a huge LED panel in the background, as tall as a four-story building, showing images of the sky.
close-ups of actresses and actors inside cockpits were filmed with the help of special stabilizers, which imitated dives or turns. Situations of imbalance and vertigo gain unexpected credibility. Slightly perceptible muscular changes in the faces denote psychological states in the face of atmospheric tenuity. The deafening sound suspends the scene.
The predictable sexist reception of the female contingent has a slight counterpoint in the commander – the shortage of pilots is dramatic, and the squadron itself has a female deputy commander, with whom he has a relationship. If life expectancy was already low, with the arrival of inexperienced women it could get worse. There is no place for superheroes, they are all – men and women – ordinary people in transformation, having as their existential substrate a constant nightmare, in dreams and in reality.
There are no miracles or happy coincidences. There are no scenes of truce with uplifting songs that calm and give hope, typical of conventional narratives. Deaths are not dramatized, they are an immediate fact of reality.
The coexistence and camaraderie grow stronger, always limited by the threshold of sudden death. Little by little, the female aeronauts die. Aleksei German Jr. has done his best to create a film full of tension between characters, but without the usual triggers of the genre — it is not the coded Hollywood war, it is the war displaced to the Soviet scenario, at that time with colossal uncertainty in the face of the power of the aggressor.
There is no shortage of poignant events to punctuate the narrative, repeated anxieties, extreme situations. Paranoia resurfaces: speaking ill of outdated airplane engines could suggest betrayal and execution. Naturally, the heroism of resistance associated with the period hovers over us — but, unlike the sentimentality of films made under the aesthetic mandate of socialist realism, there is no artificial positive characterization. Everyone can die, at any moment.
There is also a striking feature of Russian war films: the obsession with the total (or near-total) annihilation of military units in combat, which, contrary to expectations, ends up leading to good, even desired, results — victory in death. Zhenya is hit, manages to parachute out and lands in a trench in Stalingrad.
The battle that haunted that city for months was coming to an end — and the war would never be the same; the prospect of Nazi defeat was plausible. No one knows how many died on the vast Eastern Front: Aleksei German Jr. speaks of the chaos in the Soviet archives; much was lost, some 27 or 35 million fatalities.
The USSR was a pioneer in using women in combat aviation: Stalin issued an order on October 8, 1941 to deploy three air force units composed of female fighters. Wings, from 1966, is a beautiful film by Larissa Chepitko that has as its protagonist a woman, in the post-war period, an aviator decorated in the Patriotic War. During the war, the female squadrons were called “Night Witches” by the Germans. The group in “Air” is fictional, but it reflects a number of real situations, including — and above all — the catastrophe of war.
A film critical of wars, therefore. Aleksei German Jr. did not openly position himself against the invasion of Ukraine, like some of the Russian directors known in the West — Kirill Serebrennikov, Alexander Sokurov and Andrey Zvyagintsev — but neither did he praise the so-called “special operation”, like Nikita Mikhalkov and others.
For him, there was a gradual failure in globalization and the consequent emptying of dialogue was inevitable. His film was shown in Russia, but very few times abroad — an exception was the Tokyo Film Festival in 2023. “Sooner or later, dialogue will be resumed — and culture will be the first tool for this,” he concluded.
*João Lanari Bo He is a professor of cinema at the Faculty of Communication at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Cinema for Russians, Cinema for Soviets (Time Bazaar) [https://amzn.to/45rHa9F]
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