In wartime, laughter—even from its coldest laughter—can feel like an unforgivable luxury. And if Ukrainian director Antonio Lukich’s “Luxembourg’s Luxembourg” is a little more volatile, and his grotesque comedic demeanor isn’t cut with an equal dose of somber wisdom, there may be some guilt associated with enjoying it so much. But with his second feature, an expansion in ambition after his sad, tense start, “My Thoughts Are Silent,” Lukich didn’t just make his much-needed part of the escape. In the honesty of its affection and universal human observations about absent fathers, lost sons, and estranged brothers, the film not only gives us the right to laugh during a period of suffering and struggle, but makes sharing in the warmth of its sweet-loving humor seem like a lively and refreshing act of resistance.
There’s a lively atmosphere at the beginning of the movie that’s gritty and boisterous in the ’90s as Kolya and Vasya (Adrian and Damian Suleiman), where identical twins get into trouble as boys do, scrambling around train yards in Lubny, the central Ukraine city they call home. As told by the older, albeit slightly wiser, Kolya, the events of this particular day are instructive regarding the relationship of the boys. When the freight train they were riding starts to move unexpectedly, Vasya jumps in time, while the more frightened Kolya clings helplessly to the carriage, watching his brother retreat into a miserable figure far away on the tracks. Kolya will be rescued in amusing OTT fashion by his criminal father who stops the train at gunpoint while Boney M’s “Daddy Cool” explodes on the soundtrack. But the differences in the nature of boys are specific. Vasya’s fate seems to be an easier life because as the narrator Kolya sadly notes, “They say that when a son looks like his mother, he is born happy. Although we are twins, Vasya looks like our mother; I look like my father.”
Twenty years later, with their father gone from the scene and now mostly the subject of the hero-worshipping legend of Kolya, the schism between Kolya and Vasya (played as adults by Ukrainian rappers Emil and Ramil Nasirov) widens. . Kolya is a rude, low-key, unreliable drug dealer whose outrageous behavior in his day job as a bus driver degrades him to the “worst” road, used almost exclusively by retirees – and avoids being fired entirely by enduring it. The stepfather/the boss he despises. Meanwhile, Vasya works in law enforcement, hopes to get a promotion and marries the beautiful if spoiled Masha (Karina Chershevich), who has just given birth to the couple’s first child. Each brother looks awkward than the other, which is probably why there’s so little talking anymore. But then Kolya receives a phone call from a consular official telling him that their father, whom Kolya often remembers with love, as a majestic silhouette or a tattooed hand on the steering wheel, is dying in a hospital in Luxembourg. There’s definitely some kind of hesitant reunion.
But one of the welcome oddities of Lukich’s movie is that it takes time to get there, as a more schematic version of this story of the two brothers’ bickering and bonding would be the whole thrust of the plot. Lukich’s scenario is partly inspired by his own experience in the absence of parents, and perhaps that’s why he is so invested in creating separate lives for the Lubny brothers – their outlook being opposing but equally shaped by their father’s abandonment – as with the effect of a kind of reconciliation by gender. From this more generous and character-focused perspective, much of the movie’s comedy emerges. The framing of DP Misha Lubarsky gives the Nasirov brothers the appearance of muted comedic stone surfaces and makes a witty little sight of simple moments: Vasya, who fails a polygraph test when asked about his criminal connections; Kolya, hanging in a pool in a spinal correction brace, or stacking books on a chair to make up for his short stature when taking a passport photo.
This belated approach to gratification also means we’ll see how Kolya is probably not all bad, particularly through his relationship with Larisa Petrevna (a big, irritable turnaround from the late Lyudmila Sachenko), an elderly bus rider who was injured through neglect and then must work for Debt repayment. As we learn about Vasya’s difficult relationship with his wealthy in-laws, and his bosses’ condescension at work, it seems his reputation for doing business together may be as shaky as Kolya for being an irredeemable failure. So when in the last third the brothers finally embark on their road trip to Luxembourg (a chosen country, one doubts, because like the boys’ father it remains a mystery to outsiders, which is defined mostly in the popular imagination as a kind of landlocked oblivion among well-known neighbours) The payoff is subtle yet surprisingly straightforward. In no way can Luxembourg and Luxembourg be read as a commentary on Ukraine’s current bitter struggle for survival. But it is a beautiful, funny, emotional outgrowth of disrespect that is as much a part of the national character as its resilience in the face of adversity, and thus a gentle reminder – not of fighting but of what it is worth fighting for.
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