German director George Mendeluk takes a stab at historical
melodrama with “Bitter Harvest,” a tale of star-crossed lovers swooning against
the backdrop of real-life tragedy. Set in Ukraine in the early 1930’s, the film
follows a young peasant farmer and aspiring artist named Yuri (a bland Max
Irons) desperately fighting to maintain his connection to childhood sweetheart,
Natalka — portrayed by Samantha Barks, who made a great screen debut in 2012’s
“Les Misérables,” but isn’t given much to work with here.
The lovers are torn apart by the Holodomor (literally “death
by hunger”), a famine orchestrated by the genocidal policies of Joseph Stalin,
who sought to punish the region’s independence-seekers and scoop up their
resource-rich land in the process. Portrayed by actor Gary Oliver, Stalin sits
in Moscow all but twirling his moustache while bellowing lines like “Damn those
Ukrainians!”
Yuri journeys to Kiev with his political activist friends,
and leaves behind the battle-tested legacy of his Bolshevik-defying father and
grandfather (Barry Pepper and Terence Stamp, both seeming just as confused as
we are as to why they’re here). Yuri seeks to change the world through his art,
but eventually gets himself caught up in more aggressive forms of revolution.
“Bitter Harvest” is timely, arriving at a moment when
anti-Russian sentiment has reached a confusing new point. But Mendeluk’s
attempts to give the history some emotional heft are more often awkward and
clumsy. The director’s past work has mostly been in television (his last
theatrical release was “Meatballs III: Summer Job”), and the epic scope he’s
aiming for consistently eludes him. His is undeniably a filmmaker with plenty
of ambition, unfortunately it’s made by those who seem to lack the resources or
ability to really do it right.
This article appears in Feb 22-28, 2017.
