A digicam factors at a fantastic lady in a scenic setting. “Firebird” She smiles; she is accustomed to being checked out with curiosity and admiration. However, we see via the lens of the digicam and the attention of the photographer that the main focus has been adjusted to blur the girl within the foreground to sharpen the picture of the person behind her and to the left. The photographer is Roman (Oleg Zagorodnii), the person he’s actually specializing in is Sergey (Tom Prior, who additionally co-scripted), the lady who doesn’t notice that the picture is not going to seize her smile is Luisa (Diana Pozharskaya). It’s the Seventies and all three are within the Soviet Union-era navy in Estonia, based mostly on this true story as instructed years later by Sergey.
“Firebird” is a swooningly romantic love story, clearly influenced and impressed by movies like “Brokeback Mountain,” with themes of forbidden love in an ultra-masculine setting. It additionally attracts from a number of the basic love tales of the previous like “Now Voyager,” with deep, unabashed romanticism, as if the modernist tone of ironic distance by no means existed. This love story will get the full-scale, old-school glamour remedy: beautiful folks, craving glances, beautiful photos, swelling music, passionate kisses, interlaced fingers, golden moments, anguished moments. Though there are very specific passages, past the wildest creativeness of the film romances of the Nineteen Forties and ’50s, “Firebird” holds on to the symbolic depiction of ardor, with rainstorms and even a shot of planes hovering via the sky at a climactic second.
Because the story opens, Sergey is a person in his final weeks of navy service, simply as Roman, an officer and a fighter pilot is arriving at the bottom. There’s a right away connection over their shared curiosity about creating pictures. However, the distinction of their rank, the problem of discovering a method to sense each other’s curiosity, and the chance of 5 years of arduous labor for gay exercise make it virtually inconceivable for them to search out their method to a kiss. By the point it occurs, we’re anticipating it virtually as eagerly as they’re.
Director and co-screenwriter Peeter Rebane evokes the chilliness and repression of the Soviet-era navy tradition, the place self-discipline is extraordinarily inflexible, even brutal, however with the skinny veneer of brotherhood. Officers are oxymoronically known as “Comrade Colonel” and “Comrade Lieutenant.” Regardless of the suggestive chumminess of the language, the hierarchy is strictly noticed and no departure from even essentially the most trivial of the principles is tolerated. This provides to the already overpowering stakes for Roman and Sergey.
It additionally gives a pointy distinction with the tenderness and deep emotion of their interactions. To see them bare is not only sexual; it’s seeing them free of the tough constrictions and drab, similar formality of their uniforms, in a state of nature. It’s a clever selection to position their happiest and most liberated moments away from the barracks and the drills. Their embrace within the water is a rebirth right into a pure world.
Immersion of one other variety produces photos that bloom on the web page to disclose and to seize a second, a look, a connection between topic and observer. The fragile course of creating pictures is one other counter to the tough, impersonal, navy setting. The design of the buildings and uniforms and the limitless guidelines are supposed to obliterate individuality, even time itself with its sameness day after day. Every little thing is directed in order for the best risk effectivity of assaults and destruction. The primary {photograph} taken within the movie may very well be an easy snapshot of three colleagues. However, it takes on nice import proper from the start because the group has to lie concerning the objective of the image to seem to comply with the principles, after which later because the photographer and the topics will transfer very removed from the easy camaraderie of that second.
When Sergey tells Roman that he has by no means seen a ballet, Roman arranges for him to go to a rehearsal of Stravinsky’s The Firebird, based mostly on the parable of the magical hen captured and freed by a prince, later returning to rescue the prince from an evil immortal. This movie is a bittersweet love story about characters burdened by oppression, however, the theme of liberation is as palpable because of the sense of loss.