Arriving at the Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) in Estonia this year, I found myself witness to a brewing controversy. Deaf Lovers, a new film about two star crossed lovers — one Ukrainian and one Russian — had managed to uniquely piss off both pro-Ukrainian groups and had almost gotten pulled from the competition. The director, Boris Guts, is a Russian dissident currently living in Serbia; his last film, Minsk (2022), was a critique of the Belarusian government, and he intended the cross-cultural Deaf Lovers as an allegorical exploration of the tensions between Ukraine and Russia. The titular romance is less star-crossed than misbegotten, a drunken affair pinned up by nihilism and rancor where cuteness barely conceals antipathy. It’s a film where no one looks great, least of all the Russian boyfriend who is equal parts rapist and thief.
Unfortunately, many disagreed. The Ukrainian State Film Agency (USFA), the Ukrainian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture, the National Public Broadcasting Company of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Embassy in Estonia, and the Ukrainian Community of Estonia (which apparently speaks in one unified voice) asked for its removal from the festival. In a joint statement they claimed it used “post-truth methods,” and by showing the film, the festival was “becoming a tool for films blurring the boundaries of understanding reality.” The Russians also allegedly decried the film along the same reasoning, but with an opposing ideological direction. That none of the offended parties apparently saw the movie first, or that the movie was nothing more than typical arthouse pablum, seemed of no import.
PÖFF, for its part, issued a public declaration of their pro-Ukrainian intentions, removed it from a small sidebar on Ukrainian cinema while keeping it in the main competition, and called a press conference involving Guts, as well as a Ukrainian documentarian coming from the front lines of the war. The first “question” posed to Guts during the conference was less genuine inquiry than an attempt to elicit a loyalty oath. “Is Russia the aggressor in Ukraine right now?” the moderator asked. Guts response: “Is there any option?”, an answer which showed more nerve than this writer had at first thought him capable of. But, unlike most of the interested parties, I was judging him based on the movie: a rather dull affair lacking in generative ambiguity and incredibly muddled in its opinions. Far from the work of a provocateur, it’s a film relatively conventional in its opinions, with a few Gaspar Noé-ish attempts at transgression that fall flat — one of them being an offhand and slightly ambiguous reference to a Russian soldier castrated by his Ukrainian captors. It’s easy to see why this might be offensive to some, but that doesn’t make Deaf Lovers, which spends most of its running time harping on how bad the Russian invasion is, propaganda. For better or worse, this little media circus that grew around the movie and became more notable than the film itself is.
The film’s plot is simple enough: a boy (Daniil Gazizullin) and a girl (Anastasia Shemyakina) meet in Istanbul. She’s Ukrainian, he’s Russian, and they’re both seemingly deaf. They instantly hit it off, despite lacking any on-screen chemistry. They spend their days getting obnoxiously drunk and their nights fucking nonstop in front of the TV as reporters drone on about the war in Ukraine on an endless loop. Across 80 minutes, the film almost never moves beyond this premise until its obvious, inevitable conclusion: a messy breakup filled with nationalistic rancor. Largely, then, the film is comprised of repetitive sign language-based conversations, mostly about drinking and fucking, the occasional phone call home to talk about the war, and some light speculation on whether they’re both actually deaf. That they’re both irreversibly emotionally fucked up by the war seems to be the film’s main point, but it’s such an obvious, trite one that watching two beautiful but untalented actors harp on that same point for 80 minutes is pure slog.
The film is shot in the generic indie-arthouse style that’s been the aesthetic du jour of festival films since the ’90s: a wandering handheld camera lacking in compelling mise en scène; flat, largely naturalistic lighting that does little to convey emotion; generic attempts at pictorial beauty (in this case, tourist shots of iconic Istanbul landmarks); and self-serious performances devoid of idiosyncrasy. Throw in a few all-too-obvious metaphors — like a lengthy late-film shot of the girl lugging a suitcase up ten flights of stairs, corporealizing her emotional frustration — and you’ve got the sort of heavy-handed, sleepy dreck that no longer seems to move hearts or minds. The one bold aesthetic choice Guts makes throughout the film is to completely forgo sound effects like footsteps, door slams, hand movements, which forces us to experience the world as if we were one of the deaf lovers. Unfortunately, even Guts’ most inspired idea is undermined, as the result is less immersive than monotonous, over-emphasizing Deaf Lovers‘ generic ambient room tone. Important conversations are scored to nothing but the hollow sounds of cars passing outside a hotel window or the indistinct and very artificial chatter of background bar talk.
During the film’s press conference, Guts talked about his conceptualization of Istanbul as a sort of limbo, a nowhere place where these two lovers can sleepily duke it out with all of their national baggage. It’s a decent metaphor and it at least shows that Guts is putting some intellectual work into his project. If only the film didn’t seem like such a nonentity itself, perhaps this approach would have landed. As is, no such luck.
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