Bernard-Henri Lévy, a year ago, returned from his exploration of the raw wounds of our world with a book and a film: On the road of nameless men. Already, he was advancing in the muddy trenches of the Donbass on the front lines of the conflict with Russia. A year later, the war in Ukraine is no longer forgotten. The men and women who make it have a face, and often a name. Like the names of the towns which have since suffered disembowelment by Russian missiles and soldiers – Boutcha, Severodonetsk, Irpin, Mariupol… These are the names and these faces that Bernard-Henri Lévy went to find on the spot, pursuing tirelessly this work of immediate history which does not seek the cold step back nor the temperance of the analysis, but probes with even the flesh the wounds and the dramas.
Of all, Lévy might have been the least surprised by the invasion. He had smelled the air of kyiv, met Zelensky and Poroshenko, seen the Russians massing at the borders. Barely a few days after the launch of the Russian operations, he brought together intellectuals, artists and politicians at the Antoine Theater to sound the alarm and provoke rallying. Then, he left for Odessa and elsewhere, to film, testify, with his faithful Gilles Herzog. Before Western television, before official visits. And yet. In this film that he reports, never does the arrogance of “I told you so”. On the contrary, through the eight chapters that punctuate this big hour of film, everything is, on the part of this witness, only bewilderment, amazement in front of the ruins and the massacres, disgust in front of what war does to men – and especially this Putinian war which of the war does not respect any rule.
Here are the memories of kyiv in revolution, here are the images of the bombarded cities of Ukraine, so comparable to crushed Aleppo or Mosul, and here, in a restaurant in kyiv, this very singular dialogue, in times of peace, with a grave Zelensky and laugh. But the archive does not make sense. When he strolls through Boutcha, the Ukrainian Oradour, Lévy does not know where to look, so much is the horror revealed everywhere, blue corpses, women in tears, destroyed houses, mass graves, hastily dug graves. Even accustomed to the sufferings of war, he remains as if taken aback by the brutality of the bombings, their gratuitousness, also by the cheerful serenity of children still ready to play, the incredible courage of the fighters of the Azovstal factory ready to die for their country. . Parade in landscapes of ruins and desolation of soldiers, civilians, ordinary citizens for whom the Ukrainian anthem has become the song that reassures and warms, a funeral antiphon.
This war is our war
Lévy’s voice-over commentary is the slowest, deepest we’ve heard in his films. Each word stands out with its weight of enigma and scandal. Because basically, what is amazing is the blindness of this violence. The film shows the point of view of the combatants, but we do not see Russians, except perhaps a tank from time to time. Of the Russians we only see the work of death. So there is in this voice-over constantly like a shiver which one does not know if it is that of incomprehension or of the radical, tense attempt of reason to describe all the same, to understand all the same. It’s probably the two that give it this singular, almost hypnotic weight.
Over the course of the film, an obvious fact emerges. This violence which strikes out of nowhere, for reasons that cannot be fully understood, which kills civilians even before killing soldiers, which creates misery and pain, this violence has, in reality, , no limit because it has no other object than itself. In this statement that digs into the repulsed earth of the fields and the heaped up ruins of buildings, in this camera that scrutinizes the emaciated faces of the combatants, we feel an intimate, almost obsessive search: could this therefore be the face of Evil? Yes, it is indeed this hideous grimace of Evil that this film reveals, and its conclusion is all the more obvious: this war is our war. For Evil will not distinguish between us and them. He never did, he never will.
If we follow these paths in pale apocalyptic settings, it is because in all of this a mystery holds us back and perhaps fascinates us: Lévy, without big words, remaining almost on edge with facts and dates , tacitly convokes a metaphysics everywhere. All these men who seem to be confronting the Russians and their leader, Putin, seem as courageous as they are almost overwhelmed by the violence which is uninterruptedly descending and which gives itself false pretexts (the denazification of Ukraine) to intensify its destructions. Nothing rational justifies this violence. It is only the expression of the supreme unreason that is this fatality of Evil.
Why Ukraine?
Hence the sinister echo that the very title of the film sends back: Why Ukraine? Yes, why did the hand of fate fall on this country aspiring to democracy and freedom? Why this steel storm on this country precisely? Well precisely because he longed for democracy and freedom. That is to say, on the contrary of Evil. If Bernard-Henri Lévy was the first to enter into the scandal of this war, it is because he did not reserve for it the somewhat distant analysis of the expert or even of the journalist. He read its causes and effects as a moralist. This is what the film shows: the overthrow of all forms of morality by despotism and the taste for blood, and the infinity of horror that results.
This makes this film not a lesson in history, nor a lesson in politics, but a lesson in moral philosophy. Hence the singular strength of Zelensky, seen here as a dancing clown, then as a cheeky president, finally as a warlord. The shadow of his stature is projected over the whole film because in him this moral transfiguration has taken place, which alone is valid in the face of Evil. Courageous he is; determined, he is too; but more than anything, he holds high in the face of hatred and devastation the integrity of this moral conscience which stiffens against whoever wants to break it.
With reverence for reporting, this film is not reporting. Intertwining yesterday and today, probing hearts, he has another ambition. That of making us touch the finger, once again, with this obsessive constancy in Bernard-Henri Lévy, the abyss of Evil in action in History. She is showing us her filthy snout. It is to get us out of our sleepwalking slumber to strike us once again with the spectacle of what violence and hatred do when they are given free rein, flouting all rules, all laws, and all decency. The film is not only this testimony to Putin’s violence: it is in itself a violent, chilling film, narrated in a voice that conveys more than once the dread of what it narrates.
Ukraine today. Or tomorrow ? At the end of the film, these few soldiers in T-shirts, in the gray cold, waiting in a sad plain for the enemy to appear, appear as the advanced sentinels of our freedoms so often neglected. Yes, what this film says is that in the face of Evil, there is only one possible choice, which the Ukrainians, for our greatest luck, have embraced with ardor: to become heroes.