Movie about Mazepa period

[Madison]

A Ukrainian Film's Hazy History Lesson

The Washington Post KIEV -- The climactic scene of Ukraine's first real epic movie features the Tsar Peter the Great and the Cossack hetman, or leader, who betrayed him, Ivan Mazepa, drinking toasts at a surreal bloody banquet as the Battle of Poltava rages around them.

"Thank you, great tyrant, for destroying Ukraine!" cries Mazepa.

A crazed Peter leaps across the table and seizes Mazepa's face. "I will tear your mouth, you stinking dog!" Then he turns to his troops. "Soldiers! Kill all Ukrainians! For the tsar!"

"A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa," Ukraine's biggest-budget feature film since its independence, boasts little of the subtlety of highbrow post-Soviet cinema from Russia and none of the escapism mass-produced by Hollywood. It will not stir young girls like "Titanic" did or young boys like another "Star Wars" installment. Yet it is stirring a national dialogue about what it means to be Ukrainian in a country that never really was a country until just 11 years ago.

Mazepa, as every Ukrainian knows, is famed for switching sides during Peter's long-running war with Sweden in exchange for a promise of Ukrainian independence -- only to watch the Russians crush that dream, along with the Swedes, at Poltava in 1709. For nearly three centuries since, Mazepa has been reviled in Russian and Soviet history books as the ultimate traitor. But now that his own people finally enjoy the freedom he failed to win, he has been rehabilitated. In perhaps the ultimate honor a new nation can give, Ukraine put his face on its currency.

It was probably inevitable, then, that he would be the subject of Ukraine's most ambitious attempt at grand filmmaking to date -- and perhaps just as inevitable that the movie would so infuriate Moscow that it has been effectively banned in Russia. For Ukraine, "Prayer" has become part of the ongoing search for national identity in a place still rediscovering a history wiped out by generations of foreign rule.

"The film doesn't give any answers to the audience," said Filipp Illienko, son of the film's director, Yury Illienko, and one of three actors who play Mazepa. "I think it states the questions and each person who sees the film has to make up his mind: Who was Mazepa and what was his role in Ukrainian history and what is Ukraine's place in Europe and the world?"

Yury Illienko's view of Ukraine's traditional place becomes clear at the start of the film, as his Mazepa displays a map of Europe in the shape of a woman, her intimate area placed in the east where Ukraine is today. The metaphor of Ukraine as a woman raped repeatedly by invaders persists throughout the movie's often-graphic sexual imagery. Mazepa, in Illienko's view, represents what might have been, the nationhood Ukraine was denied so long ago and achieved so belatedly.

Illienko, 66, a longtime director who made several movies that were banned during Soviet times, has wanted to make this film since the 1970s but could never do so as long as Russians ruled. He argues that had King Charles XII of Sweden beaten Peter the Great at Poltava and kept his deal, Mazepa would have been remembered as the George Washington of Ukraine.

Instead, Peter heard Mazepa was plotting against him and took his vengeance by slaughtering thousands of Ukrainians at the hetman's home base of Baturyn, sending their bodies floating down a river to intimidate Mazepa's soldiers from following his lead. With the Cossacks thus split and dispirited, Peter went on to defeat Charles at Poltava in what became the pinnacle of the tsar's reign, establishing Russia as a great European power for the first time.

Mazepa, on the other hand, died in disgraced exile; only in 1992 did the Ukrainian Orthodox Church remove the anathema, or curse of damnation, placed upon him by Peter's order, and only in 1999 were his remains returned from Romania for burial at Baturyn.

Illienko put together "A Prayer for Hetman Mazepa" only by enlisting the help of the Ukrainian government, which contributed a share of the $2.3 million production costs. The government also contributed the film's lead actor, Bohdan Stupka, a former culture minister. The movie debuted at the Berlin Film Festival earlier this year and hits Ukrainian screens this month.

"Prayer" may confuse foreign audiences. It is not a linear narrative intended to represent reality, but rather a 152-minute "phantasmagoric dream of history," as Illienko put it, a circus hall of mirrors in which characters and scenes are twisted, warped, distorted. The special effects are comically crude -- a tide of red paint to represent blood, porcelain statues mixed in with real actors to represent a battlefield of corpses.

Mazepa dies and comes back to life several times, in one form or another. Characters are raped, decapitated and tarred and feathered. The portrayal of Peter is particularly brutal; he comes across as a madman who sodomizes one of his own soldiers in the opening sequence. Mazepa does not always seem a font of sanity, either, with much of the movie focusing on his sexual appetites, including an affair with his goddaughter.

Reviews have been predictably mixed. Variety, the bible of the American film industry, panned it.

Yury Shevchuk, a scholar who teaches Ukrainian at a Harvard summer institute, described it as "a kind of Freudian foray into the human psyche," though he too lamented that it was not a more reality-based portrayal akin to Mel Gibson's "Braveheart."

The unhappiest reviews have come from Russia, where the government has advised movie houses not to run it. "The Culture Ministry believes this film is anti-Russian and turns the known history of Russian-Ukrainian relations on its head, and therefore does not recommend that it be shown in Russian theaters," Culture Minister Mikhail Shvydkoi announced in July.

Even some prominent Ukrainians have expressed discomfort with the film and its ramifications on relations with Moscow. Viktor Pinchuk, a leading businessman and the president's son-in-law, said he had not seen it but was disturbed by what he had read. "This kind of interpretation of Russian history, I don't like it," he said.

Filipp Illienko said people have overreacted. "This is not an anti-Russian film," he said. "This is an anti-imperialist film. The imperial part of Russia, they sure will not like it. But it doesn't insult Russia itself."

As for the dark themes, he said, "Most of Ukraine's history is a dark one and I'm not sure we are now coming through a bright period. But the [Mazepa] period was a moment when our nation had a chance to throw off the yoke of Moscow and to become really independent. In our history we had only a few chances to do so. And only the last time did we manage to do so."