It is not the job of a documentary to give a particular subject a slick of Hollywood gloss. Instead, it is tasked with objectively laying bare an event, a person or a part of the world. In the case of Finnish director, Pirjo Honkasalo, her film The Three Rooms of Melancholia offers very little in the way of narration or focusing your gaze. Instead, it offers an extremely bleak, virtually silent depiction of war.
The war in question is the Second Chechnyan War, which took place between 1999 and 2009. To get this documentary made, the film crew had to sneak into Chechnya as Russian authorities forbade foreigners from entering the region. Honkasalo divides her film into the titular three rooms – room one is longing, room two is breathing and room three is remembering. Each “room” takes us to a different location; a different viewpoint on a seemingly endless war.
Room one immerses the viewer in a military training academy in Kronstadt, a fortress island near St Petersburg. Honkasalo opens with row upon row of pre-teen cadets lining up to make their beds, wash and prepare for inspection. The noise of the cadets moving in unison fills the screen – there are constant messages over a tannoy, boot-clad heels marching on frozen ground; target practice with the pop of dummy ammunition; squeaky trainers on gymnasium floors. This seems to engage the young boys – contrasted with their barely stifled yawns when forced to sit at a desk in a classroom.
Honkasalo’s voiceover introduces us to a few of them – Kolya, aged 11; Misha, aged 10; Tolmachev, aged 12. She remarks, without a hint of emotion, that most of these boys have ended up at the academy because their parents are dead, missing or have succumbed to alcoholism. Their young eyes widen and their mouths open as they are made to watch Russian news reports of bombings in civilian areas. One young boy earnestly telephones his mother and asks her to pick him up, having just relayed that he has learned to stitch a soft toy.
The endless close-ups of all the young faces at the academy only serve to underline their youth and, perhaps, an innocence that has been torn from them. We learn that fourteen-year-old Sergej watched his father’s body be exhumed from a mass grave. “I’m going to be a soldier. I know what war is. I’m not afraid to kill bad people.” This premature hardness is neatly juxtaposed with footage of him tucking his blind grandmother into her blanket whilst serving her tea and bread.
Room two sees Honkasalo switch to black and white, with hand-held footage lending the air of a news report. As she scans across Grozny, the Chechnyan capital, we see wireframes of bombed-out buildings stretch like twisted branches into the air. The buildings that have survived stand toothless, with all their windows blown out. Children play in the rubble whilst stray dogs look for food.
The sound, here, is equally unsettling. Tanks grumble by, dogs bark, children shriek, and women beg and hold up photos of missing loved ones. Water gurgles in a well and we hear the unsteady breathing of a child in a gas mask. The limited score, which is carried over from the first section, is a mixture of sonorous strings and haunting operatic vocals. It adds to the feeling of isolation. Everyone here – old and young alike – seems fragile. The section ends with three young children crying as they are wrenched from their sick mother. The horrors never end.
Room three moves back to colour and to a refugee camp in the Republic of Ingushetia, near the Chechnyan border. Islamic ceremonies take place, with prayers sung and hands held. It seems a livelier, more hopeful place until you hear the planes drone overhead and see row upon row of tents. A verdant landscape filled with grazing sheep and dazzling white horses belies childhood victims of rape and assaults; orphans who have nothing left and who cannot picture a brighter future. If this all sounds grim, it’s because it is. The film never drops the harrowing levels of intensity and hopelessness that stain these young lives. The Three Rooms of Melancholia is an incredibly bleak and isolating watch – one that will have you reaching for comfort viewing afterwards but is, nonetheless, essential storytelling.
The Three Rooms of Melancholia will have its premiere at Docs Ireland
