Ukrainian first-time feature director Marysa Nikitiuk’s When the Trees Fall is a fairytale of gasping, screaming excess, where narrative is seconded to an intense visual lyricism that pummels away at the viewer. Larysa (Anastasia Pustovit) is in love with the local bad guy, who’s again, excessively, called Scar (Maksym Samchyk). Although the narrative focus is mainly on Larysa, the story is often mediated through her wide-eyed, blond younger sister, Vitka (Sofia Khalaimova), and it’s this, more than anything, that allows Nikitiuk to play around with the parameters of her filmic reality, introducing a shifting and erratic symbolism that reminded me of Valerie’s Week of Wonders (Jaromil Jireš, 1970).
A line in Svetlana Alexievich’s book Second-hand Time (2013), another dreamlike tract, describes a memory of Ukraine – “The soil there is so fertile you can stick a stake in and it will grow into a tree”¹ – and the presence of nature in When the Trees Fall corresponds to this image. Larysa and Vitka live in a small village buried in the forest and their world teems with life; a nature twinned with a wild sexuality against which the older women, representing the social order, pit their wills. The intensely physical relationship between Larysa and Scar plays out against this backdrop, the green vibrancy of the forest and a bright village summer, and the dynamic between these two spaces is explored as the film moves away from the idyllic pastoralism of the opening to a darker consideration of the ways in which society controls and limits women’s agency. In the stricter world of the village, everything changes. Larysa is expected to marry the son of a family friend, Roman (Vadim Kovaliov), and Scar is sent by his boss to a nearby town on a quest of petty violence that rapidly deteriorates. The other characters – with the exception of Vitka and Larysa’s girlfriends – unequivocally disapprove of their relationship: the older women chastise and beat Larysa. As for the rest of Scar’s hyper-male crew, she barely even registers as anything other than a pretty distraction.
But beneath the poetry of the film is a very real thread of social commentary. The outsize presence of nature, with its heavy flowers, dense vegetation, and surreally oversized fruits, comes to stand for what the older women see as the wayward fertility of the community, what Larysa’s future mother-in-law jokes is the shared parentage of the ubiquitous children. This clash between the old and the new, the continual threat of intergenerational violence, animates When the Trees Fall. On finding Larysa, post-tryst, sleeping in an old bathtub, her grandmother rushes back into the garden, hose in hand, and wakes her with an onslaught of cold water. She chases Larysa through the house and blames her for what the neighbours will think. It’s through moments like these that Nikitiuk reminds us that the chains of social expectation in rural Ukraine are all too heavy. At this stage we haven’t yet seen another villager, but they’ve seen her, and have already told her authoritarian grandmother what she’s been up to after dark.
The idea of watching, and of being watched, is continued in later scenes. After running away from her grandmother and parting with Scar, Larysa heads for her mother’s place in the town: she walks beneath the shadow of a great old pre-fab and other women come to the windows and look down at her. Later, when hunting for a child’s mother, Larysa peers through the cracked wooden wall of an old shed to see her prone beneath an unidentified man whilst another man smokes, and the mechanism of the sexual act combined with her heavily pregnant belly seems to exemplify the general lot of women in the village. The preoccupation of When the Trees Fall with glass, windows, half-light and reflections, gaps and cracks, forces us to share in this piecing together of perspectives. When Larysa is put to work by her mother in an accounting office, we observe her through a smeared glass window and this visual distancing translates the interior space into something from a dream, where everything is liminal, half-real. Our attention is drawn to several things: her pale hair and the way that it catches the sunlight; the dark green plants that interrupt the dusky half-light of this clerk’s place; and her face, scowling, inclined over a heap of old files. A voice cuts across the laughter of the women inside and asks her, “Larysa, why are you so sad?”
It’s the nightmare logic of the system that leads Larysa, tongue-tipped with protest, to her too-early marriage with the unwanted Roman. The older women are the primary antagonists in When the Trees Fall and we see them as agents of this law. When Larysa returns home to her mother, her mother beats her and calls her a slut. But the following night, when both mother and daughter smoke together in a murky twilight, fantastically blonde, and the darkness wipes out their features, we’re made to understand that they are both in the same prison. Following this, it’s in the treatment of the idea of the village and the social control that it embodies that Nikitiuk’s film really stands out – in the dusty room full of laughing women, or in how Larysa’s mother implores her to marry Roman even though it’s obvious her daughter can’t stand him, and then in the way that she looks away during the wedding, when Larysa visibly struggles in his embrace. Later, when he kisses her again, she loses it – she fights her way through the throng of wedding guests and tries to escape. The men restrain her; she thrashes on the floor. Another woman leans over her, perhaps her grandmother, or her mother – they’re all blonde and it’s hard to tell in the dark – and tries to comfort her. A man, one of Roman’s relatives, leans over and says, dismissively, “She’ll be fine when the kids are born.”
1 Svetlana Alexievich, Second-Hand Time (2013), p. 156
Missouri Williams is a writer living in the Czech Republic. She is Assistant Editor of Another Gaze. Her instagram can be found at @missouriwilliams
