George Mendeluk (director)
Arrow Films (studio)
15 (certificate)
103 (length)
24 February 2017 (released)
24 February 2017
Director George Mendeluk, who co-wrote Bitter Harvest with executive producer Richard Bachynsky-Hoover, took on the challenge of telling the story for the ‘Holodomor’, one of the most brutal, cruellest and barbaric events in world history: Stalin’s use of famine from 1932-1933 as a weapon to suppress the Ukraine’s resistance against his regime. Millions starved to death and the tragedy only came to light in 1991 after the fall of the Soviet Union.
The film opens majestically with beautiful shots of the Ukraine’s countryside – filmed on location – and the peasants going about their business. The voiceover of Yuri (Max Irons) sets the scene of childhood love, of family and the bounty of the land. Lenin is in power and the idealists speak of going away to work and practice the arts. Yuri and his childhood sweetheart Natalka (Samantha Barks) are looking to a blissful future of marriage and family.
Lenin dies Stalin takes over and he’s set upon dealing with the Ukrainian ‘problem’. These scenes with Stalin (Gary Oliver) are short, filmed in a lurid coloured hue, but capture the gross nature of the man, his court and lackeys.
The systematic brutality of the starvation policy is covered, the problem is that the device used to tell the story of the ‘Holodomor’ is not that original and taken with some pretty stock characters, the film doesn’t elicit very much sympathy for them.
The young lovers are torn apart, the idealist who discovers that communism isn’t what he signed up for and the brutal commander. Lob in Terrance Stamp as the archetypal patriarch, plus his fight with the brutal commissar half his age and you have almost the complete set.
So, try as they might – and they do – the cast don’t have a lot work with character wise, and there are mixed results. Irons doesn’t really convince as Yuri. Tamar Hassan’s Commissar is a by the numbers nasty character dishing out the brutality, dressed in regulation leather coat and sporting a goatee. Barks fares a little better; her desperation and humiliation palpable as she contemplates servitude and prostitution with the Commissar.
To the filmmakers credit the film looks splendid the palette changing from the golden harvest to wretched greys and browns as the horror of the famine unfolds.
There is an important and powerful story to be told here and while Bitter Harvest does not hold back on the devastation and cruelty of Stalin’s famine policy, it just does not quite have the gut wrenching emotional punch of say a Schindler’s List or The Killing Fields. It’s telling that the most moving and terrifying part of the film is at the end, when the cold facts are presented over a still photo of corpses.