The press releases for “Stop-Zemlia” call Kateryna Gornostai’s coming-of-age story “radical, authentic, and sensitive.”These two descriptions are correct. The movie’s power, however, comes not from any radicalism but from how authentically ordinary it feels.
This film shows that Ukrainian teens live almost the same lives as their American counterparts. Although much of the action is seen through Masha’s eyes (Maria Fedorchenko), it often breaks down to include the perspectives of her classmates. Her two closest friends are Yana (Yana Istenko) and Senia Arsenii Markov. Senia, her best friend, is especially concerned about identity. His long hair, gentle disposition, and friendship with two women have encouraged gossip about him sexuality.
This is the 21stcentury, even the people sharing the gossip acknowledge both how retrograde such speculation is, and how much about all of their lives feels fluid, including sexuality and identity. They change their perspectives, emotions, fears, and anxieties from day-to-day to minute. They are self-aware enough to realize that they’ve yet to fully form, while actively observing their own growth in real time. (The title refers a playground game that challenges students to push them forward and backward.
Gornostai is the writer-director of this narrative feature. She started her career in documentaries. In small and large ways, her nonfiction background proves to have been a great asset. Interstitial interviews with teens give the impression that they are real and bring depth to scenes like texting, drinking or flirting. The young actors feel so at ease in their roles thanks to months of intensive preparation.
Gornostai’s strengths are also evident in her recreations of adolescent egoism. Aside from the formal interviews, there is nothing at all that matters outside of any given moment, whether it’s at a frenetic school dance, or a droningly dull science class, or an anxiety-provoking, bond-building house party.
Cinematographer Oleksandr Roshchyn is particularly adept at establishing the naturalistic moods — simultaneously consequential and quicksilver — that Gornostai intends, his camera lingering on settings adults might skim right past. He is able to adapt to fretful energy and leans in stillness, whether he is staring at the windows of a more exciting world or making his bed in anarchically messy bedroom.
It must be said that Gornostai’s ambitions do occasionally feel as chaotic as those of her subjects. It’s clear that she shifts the viewpoints from her primary trio to those of their classmates in order to encompass a wider range of perspectives. And it’s a nice touch to include the outlook of one parent, who is as alienated as her son. But because these side storylines aren’t as well-integrated as those of Masha and her BFFs, they can come across as rote and distracting.
Meanwhile, her choice to focus an unblinking lens on her young heroine’s bare breast comes across as purely dispiriting, especially given the movie’s intentional respect for the teens throughout. Perhaps one of the reasons for Masha’s amorphous melancholy is the knowledge that even the most empathetically told stories of intelligent young women are still eventually undercut by reflexive objectification.
“Stop-Zemlia”Los Angeles theatres will be showing the film, and VOD will premiere it on Friday.