No one comes to us as bandits, only liberators. . ? World War II brought countless misfortunes to the Ukrainian land and led to a split in society. Most of the residents took the Soviet side and joined the Red Army units and partisan detachments. A smaller part of Ukrainians joined the structures of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, hoping with the help of the Nazis to return independence to Ukraine.
The conflict of love and duty, the problem of moral choice, the viewer can observe in the military drama Cherry Nights. By the way, the motif of the name should be sought in the original source - the story of the same name by Boris Kharchuk, since in the film it is not explained in any way.
The film deserves attention, first of all, for the courage of its creators. Nights was filmed in 1992, when the myths of Soviet ideology still had a remarkable impact on the minds of viewers. The picture of Arkady Mikulsky in a certain sense is innovative, because in it the soldiers of the Red Army and the soldiers of the UPA are shown as two equal sides. Even no, in the Nights there is a certain sympathy for the Forest Brothers: their actions are motivated by a national idea, fastened by family ties. On the contrary, the Red Army is presented as a gang of chauvinists, cogs of the system, mindlessly executing orders.
Elements of the detective in the picture are present not only due to the confrontation of “red” and “red-black”. The key figure of the second plan is Mr. Sikorsky, an accomplice who helps “ours and yours.” It is very interesting to observe the facial expressions and gait of Konstantin Stepankov: after all, his hero, working on two fronts, is in constant tension because of the danger of disclosure by both opposing sides at once. In appearance, Mr. Sikorsky is an ordinary peasant with a somewhat downtrodden appearance. This rural machinator is probably scrolling through his complex combination, trying to get the maximum benefit for himself. He hopes that his unscrupulousness will help him make the “right choice” in time.
Slavic and Olena as Romeo and Juliet in wartime. They belong to different camps, fight for opposing ideas - but first of all, they are a boy and a girl. If in the book their love was an outburst of feelings, an impulse that allowed Slavik and Olena to move away from convention at least for a moment, then in the film their relationship is built in a logical chain, absolutely motivated and serve as a solid foundation on which the plot is built. Perhaps the key merit of the director is that he managed to transfer to the screen one of the main messages of the story: a bright feeling, sincere love of a girl and a guy, which raises them above the vulgar banality of political, ethnic, social differences.
The tragedy is that Slavik and Olena decided to challenge the two machines operating them and risked feeling like ordinary people, not officials. Up to the epilogue, the intrigue remains whether young people will be able to leave the battlefield with impunity or will face severe punishment from the System.
Despite the detective story, periodic battles in the frame - then in the format of a duel, then battle - the picture is chamber. The conflict between the NKVD and the UPA plays out in the background, the main attention of the director is turned to the characters of Vladimir Shevelkov and Inna Kapinos. Their acquaintance, flirtation of Slavik, (shown?) the inaccessibility of Olena, the subsequent game of cat and mouse and even giveaways attract the attention of the viewer and make them tensely follow: when will Slavik and Olena open their feelings to each other?
A special flavor of the picture gives the atmosphere of the Western Ukrainian town. It is felt that people live in a friendly community even during a military conflict and are quite patriotic. True, everyone’s understanding of patriotism has its own. Here it is interesting to compare such dissimilar characters as the modest venerable Mrs. Maria and the “flagging” Major Sviridov with great-power habits.
By and large, Cherry Nights is neither a documentary nor an attempt to distort history. The work of Ukrainian filmmakers is a good attempt to look at well-known events without burdening themselves with ideological cliches. Again, first of all, this war drama is a hymn to the miracle of first love, which fortunately happened during the most brutal war in human history.