Now playing at the Rotterdam International Film Festival, Luka from writer-director Jessica Woodsworth is the extremely meditative story of a soldier awaiting a future war that may never come. Inspired by Dino Buzzati’s The Tartar Steppe published in 1940, the movie was filmed in black and white in a derelict Sicilian dam. Luka (Jonas Smulders) arrives at Fort Kairos alone. He tells the soldiers he meets in the base that he’s a sniper but gets told that, like everything, that role is a far way off.
Everyone who arrives starts on maintenance duty. This can potentially include SSD (shit shovelling duty) and PPD (piss pot duty) if you don’t perfectly follow the base’s three guiding tenets of Obedience, Endurance and Sacrifice. The most brutal punishment is a form of shunning they call ‘ghosting’.
Luckily for Luka, the soldiers welcome him into the fold quickly with a kind of dance/breathing exercise you might see in an experimental ballet or a men’s only emotional support retreat. The dancing circle gives way to Luka squaring up against another soldier in what looks to be a violent test of his mettle. Heartwarmingly, Luka simply climbs on the other soldier’s back like a koala bear in a return to childhood comfort and security.
As a member of the fold, he now begins the waiting. A triumvirate of the General (Geraldine Chaplin), the Duke (Hal Yamanouchi), and Commander Gor (Valentin Ganev) seem to have ultimate control over the base. They themselves seem controlled by the years of inaction, like they’ve overdosed on the uninterrupted ceremony of a military that hasn’t needed to fight. The very international cast all speak perfect English. Most have very mild but differing accents from their home countries which creates a pleasing, alien effect in their already stilted and strange speech patterns.
Luka bonds especially with Konstantin (Samvel Tadevossian), the son of a higher-up stationed somewhere else, and Geronimo (Django Schrevens), a wide-eyed young-seeming recruit. They become friends and continue to wait for the enemy who may or may not show up, who may or may not exist.
The soldiers participate in increasingly meaningless training exercises, giving Woodsworth plenty of time for beautiful shots of their centreless flags (just a big waving hole) and abandoned landscape. The rifles finally come out for marksman training. The soldiers aim at mass-produced ancient Roman or Grecian-looking statue heads. Their terrible aim proves how completely useless they’d be if war were to actually break out. They are all putrid except for Luka who’s singular talent immediately gets him promoted to the vaunted position of ‘Hawk’, a ranger/sniper unit. The varied accents repeating the word “Hawk” is a lot of fun and made me realize that “H-A-W-K” is a strange looking and sounding grouping of letters.
On one of his watches, Luka spots a white horse in the distance that may or may not exist. He alerts his commanders while his friend Geronimo leaves the base to see it up close. Geronimo gets to within a foot of the horse. That he sees it also means it’s real or that it’s a group hallucination. This triggers a tragic series of events. Konstantin sees an irregular pattern in the vibrations of the earth he studies. He concludes it’s a breach of a far away wall, possibly made by the enemy army arriving from the north. He has his doubters, but Konstantin is sent with other soldiers to investigate.
The director has discussed the connection of the parched landscape in the movie to the post-apocalyptic world we’re heading towards if we don’t combat global warming. Environmental collapse isn’t the enemy we’re waiting for that won’t come, it’s the one we’re ignoring completely while we sit on our hands. The movie is very dream-like. Sitting and waiting for an apocalypse to come without feeling able to do anything about it is very dream-like too. It’s that drowning or paralysing sensation when you try to actively change the course of a dream.
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