“Tricolour”: critics about the film

In November, the filmmaker, writer Vytautas V. Landsbergis presented to the public his new full feature documentary film "Tricolour", dedicated to the Lithuanian partisan movement and struggles against the Soviet invasion after the Second World War. In the film, survivors of these battles talk about the resistance struggle. The film has attracted a wide range of opinions, but critics are unanimous on the fact that this topic is particularly close to the director, and continual inquiry by V.V. Landsbergis into the history of resistance struggle is especially meaningful to our society.

Film reviewer Gediminas Kukta (www.lfc.lt, “Mowed Meadows”) asks: Are there still any new angles, insights, facts left for the partisan theme, which seems to be already depleted - in film, and literature, and photography?  The critic writes: "Vytautas V. Landsbergis has no doubt in this.  (...) Until there are living witnesses, their stories, those small narratives, we can make films and write books.  The only question is, at what angle shall we approach the events of the past? A priori idealistically and romantically minded, or, conversely, with intention to understand the complex consciousness and experience of those who fought/betrayed, resisted/conformed, i.e., trying to explore all the contradictions of the partisan movement, which certainly were there?

Director in the "Tricolour" embraces the first option, and from the very beginning leaves no chance for the second.  Vytautas V. Landsbergis creates idealistic portrait of the guerrillas and their liaisons. Already the very first shot - Ieva Narkutė, singing and playing piano among the golden autumn leaves, with accordionist Martynas Levickis playing alongside, - prompts the whole tone of the film.  It will be beautiful, romantic, sincere, uplifted and slightly sentimental.  Such tone will continue until the end.

Period of the partisan warfare was far from a fairy tale, but the director's choice of narrative reminds of precisely that. Isn't it fairy-tale-like: a partisan talks about the birth given by his beloved in forests in biting cold December, while in the re-enacted episode we see green trees and dusty rural crossroads.

Documentary film critic, author of books and analytic articles about Lithuanian documentaries, Rūta Oginskaitė in the www.lfc.lt review "Flight from personal experiences to the map of history" states that in the case of "Tricolour" Vytautas Landsbergis comes back to the partisan stories being free, strong, secure about righteousness and necessity of his idea.

He assembled the "Tricolour" of three distinct layers - singing, documentary speaking, acted scenes of the past - and reached integrity, which has strong emotional impact.  The postwar history was bloody, but Vytautas V.Landsbergis emphasizes moral issues. Probably that's why he needs that glance at the history of his land from above. From a distance.

(...) "Tricolour" storytellers – surviving partisans and their liaisons.  From a dozen of names in the credits, a couple are already framed in black.  The last witnesses, private soldiers of the war with alien power.  The film allows us to watch up close their today's faces, the feats and experiences of their youth – from the distance of time, which stimulates understanding of why these men and women in peacetime chose the gun, inhumane living conditions, dangers, and the prospect of being shot or committing suicide.

The film's atmosphere is influenced by the print and clatter of a typewriter - echo of the partisans' interrogations, fabrication of protocols in the repressive institutions. Director uses it for titles, inserts, announcing the sub-themes of "Tricolour", which are like verses: childhood, joining the partisans, fighting, betrayal.  None of the participants in the film had escaped a similar "poem" of events, and thus the clatter of keystrokes, which meant physical victory of the enemy.  That's what is characteristic to "Tricolour": stories by all the storytellers converge into a single general story, and these are not complaints, not the pride in feats, but emotional memories of the resistance as the daily occurrence, from which moral priorities emerge that are of great concern to the director.

After all, when the pupils in schools, instead of "Good morning" used to hear a greeting by the teacher "Vilnius is enslaved" and would respond with "We will liberate it"; when a young man would go to gain strength to the grave of his brother murdered by the "stribai" (NKVD destroyers); when a teenage girl at nights would run to the town square to collect the blood of the unknown and bury it to honour at least in such a way those which were not allowed to be buried – these are stories not about exceptional cases. They talk about the inherited moral climate, and that is what Vytautas V.Landsbergis emphasizes, he bows to people to whom the need to liberate what had been enslaved was natural and self-evident. The director wants to spread the message about the price of such living in the post-war Lithuania.

Vytautas V.Landsbergis faithfully upholds his stance, and in this sense he resembles a lonely post-war partisan, who is right in his own consciousness, unwilling to resign or conform.

Individual stories of "Tricolour" are strung into a saga by the cosy voice of the narrator, actor Aidas Giniotis, that speaks specifically when we are looking at our country from above.  Invisible narrator speaks for all the departed – "now it's hard to say how many of us there were" – he starts the saga and continues it, reiterates the statement of the former partisan, adds it to the other memories, putting like a little stone in the mosaic of that Lithuanian landscape, visible from the sky, to which, thanks to the director and role players, characters and mise-en-sc`enes of those days briefly return. Childhood, joining the partisans, fighting, betrayal, clatter of protocol letters.

Those short re-enacted inserts shot from above remind us that all of that took place here, in this beautiful land of Lithuania, each patch of which had been used for partisan bunkers, as it is mentioned in the Post Scriptum to the film, where today's children are inspecting a remaining bunker getting light from the mobile phone screens. This is the final verse, which does not fall out of admirably smooth style of the film.