‘Porcelain War’ Review: Affecting But Patchy Ukraine-Set Documentary Splits Its Interests Between Art and Combat

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic In “Porcelain War,” a resilient Ukrainian couple divide their time between two seemingly antithetical pursuits: When enterprising Slava Leontyev isn’t training fellow civilian soldiers in the ongoing fight against Russia’s invasion, he and his partner Anya Stasenko are skilled ceramic artists, casting and painting dainty porcelain figurines inspired by local nature and folklore.

If the title already suggests something pointed in that disparity, this emotive debut by Leontyev and American co-director Brendan Bellomo leaves nothing to chance in ensuring we get it: Porcelain, we are told, is “fragile but everlasting, and can be restored after hundreds of years.” Lest the point still be lost on us, the couple’s combined voiceover later offers a blunter paraphrase: “Ukraine is like porcelain — easy to break, but impossible to destroy.” The metaphor is clear enough, then; whether it’s quite complex enough to sustain a feature-length documentary is another question. “Porcelain War” thrives on contrast, much of it poignant.

Prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Slava and Anya lived a bucolic life in rural Crimea, and the film often cuts sharply from gilded magic-hour footage of that idyllic recent past — rambling and foraging in the forest with their scrappy dog Frodo, diving into sun-lacquered lakes, crafting in their rustic cottage — and the cold gray light of their present-day urban existence in war-torn Kharkiv, where they moved instead of fleeing the country altogether.

There, his weaponry expertise and her enduring commitment to making art are framed as two halves of a united resistance effort: war balanced by love, bloodshed by beauty.