On the face of it, for a comfortable middle-class couple in Lithuania, getting divorced has absolutely nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. Why would it? But when their separation happens to coincide with the Russian invasion two countries away, these two very differently scaled crises wind up jointly defining a disorienting phase of family life for high-flying media exec Marija (Žygimantė Elena Jakštaitė) and slacking screenwriter Vytas (Marius Repšys). And while a whole country’s anguish may put their problems in perspective, that doesn’t necessarily make those problems easier to solve. A drily witty, subtly searing comedy from writer-director Andrius Blaževičius, “How to Divorce During the War” is both empathetic and surgical as it examines both partners’ attempts to sublimate selfish angst into social activism.
Lithuanian writer-director Blaževičius’ third feature reunites him with the two superb leads of his terrific 2021 sophomore effort “Runner,” a time-compressed relationship thriller that never broke out of the festival circuit in the way it deserved to. (Jakštaitė and Repšys also played characters called Marija and Vytas in that film, while Repšys played a Vytas in the director’s 2016 debut “The Saint”: a nod to local archetypes, perhaps, akin to Michael Haneke’s recurring incarnations of “Anne” and “Georges.”) Following a Sundance competition premiere and a directing prize for Blaževičius, the timely, accessible “How to Divorce During the War” should secure wider global distribution.
There’s been a quiet surge in Lithuanian cinema in recent years, particularly in the area of intimate, fine-grained domestic drama. Though Blaževičius’ film is tonally distinctive in its its arch realism, there’s a thread connecting it with recent festival successes like “Drowning Dry” and “Slow,” in its combination of tender everyday observation and measured formal control.
Both those virtues are on display in an early, crucial long take, shot with a static camera through the windshield of a parked car, as an exasperated Marija blindsides Vytas with the announcement that she wants a divorce. The ensuing conversation cycles through several stages of denial, pleading, assertion and violent anger, all as they wait for their pre-teen daughter Dovile (Amelija Adomaityte) to emerge from her violin lesson. The actors’ expressions aren’t wholly legible through the glass and the falling dusk, but the air around them is thick with curdling resentment and sudden grief.
For several years now, Marija’s career at a content creation company has soared while the dawdling, creatively blocked Vytas has settled into a homemaker role — an arrangement that he’s happy enough with, but she finds increasingly stifling. (She lays out these grievances in bruising detail, though is less candid about a third party’s role in her decision.) Dovile, for her part, is solemn but composed when her parents break the news: “Now you’re going to tell me you love me very much and my life isn’t going to change,” she says, having learned the script from friends with divorced parents. Like pretty much everyone else, her mind isn’t entirely on the matter: War has just broken out in Ukraine, and for most people, casual conversation revolves around nothing else.
At work, Marija instructs her colleagues to press on, advising they turn their phones off in office hours to reduce stress levels — though when her company refuses to close its Russian branch, she resigns in protest. But it’s a somewhat obligatory, half-hearted gesture, as is her decision to take in a family of Ukrainian refugees once Vytas moves out: She regrets her charity before long, complaining about the new arrivals’ disruption of her household order. Vytas, now staying with his growingly reactionary parents, makes a more concerted effort to join the resistance movement, staging public performance-art protests, volunteering at a food bank, and attempting to cut off his folks’ access to Russian propaganda on satellite TV. But is this, too, a temporary distraction from the internal collapse of his own life?
The deadpan anti-rhetoric of Blaževičius’ script is well-served by the steadily poised, standoffish gaze of DP Narvydas Naujalis’ camera, largely eschewing closeups for fixed, wide tableaux, washed in the drear of late winter. Jakub Rataj’s sparse, chilly score of ill-tuned piano and jittery percussion matches the general mood of uneasy drollery — a difficult balance also maintained in Jakštaitė and Repšys’ finely tuned, delicately ironic performances, pivoting between protective detachment and raw emotional release. It’s left to viewers to decide if these are good people reacting in human, erratic ways to bad times, or if there’s something more insidious in the compromises and hypocrisies that Marija and Vytas decide they can live with — whether in determining their political position or their living arrangements.
English (US) ·