'20 days in Mariupol': not everything goes in war

It is to be hoped that the Oscar award for best documentary will attract a large audience to

20 Days in Mariupol,

although I do not think that the majority will make it to the end.

Contrary to what the laws of morbidity dictate, the crudeness of the film is very dissuasive and there are not many people with the stomach necessary to digest the close-ups of dead children, vans of corpses and pregnant women with their intestines hanging out.

I had to see it in two attempts, but not because of that - my stomach, unfortunately, is cured of horror - but because of the artifice of the director, Mstyslav Chernov, who resorts to the tricks that I most detest in yellow journalism.

The saying that anything goes in war was taken literally.

20 Days in Mariupol

has original music, composed by Jordan Dykstra, and a narrator who intervenes in a funereal and effective tone.

They are two elementary devices of manipulation that turn the testimony into a cheap melodrama, but my doubts are more essential: many of the characters come out against their will, and some do not even know that they are being filmed.

At first you even hear protests: “Don't record us,” say some neighbors who are fleeing their homes.

Chernov harasses and persecutes like a paparazi, and since it is inevitable for me to put myself in the place of all those people, I know that I would not be happy if the whole world saw me hugging my dead baby or the dismembered corpse of my son liven up the homely evening of a European family.

Call me old-fashioned, but I still believe in each person's right to decide if they prefer to be a symbol of horror or cry alone.

On the fiction side,

The Zone of Interest

has won the Oscar for best sound without having music and hiding the narrator, giving the sensation that the film tells itself.

20 Days in Mariupol,

on the other hand, is written to the greater glory of its creators: the plot is the heroism of the journalists, how they send their images and how they take them out of the besieged city, in an exercise of professional narcissism that is difficult to justify.

The area of ​​interest

is fiction, but it is close to the truth and proposes a moral reflection of great depth.

20 Days in Mariupol

is a documentary that turns truth into cheap fiction.

I suppose Chernov will dismiss my misgivings as the squeamishness of a privileged writer who has not been stained with blood.

Maybe, but not everything goes in war.

You can tell hell without making a pact with the devil.

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