Abel Ferrara Doc on Ukraine, Patti Smith – The Hollywood Reporter

Ukraine may have bled out of the headlines in the U.S., apart from coverage of the recent farcical-tragic partisan fight over foreign aid for Ukraine in Congress. But the war is certainly not out of mind in Europe, and especially Germany, which shelters a significant number of Ukraine refugees and immigrants as well as many Russian expats.

Appeal for that local audience may be one reason that documentary Turn in the Wound is playing at the Berlinale as a special presentation, along with the fact that its director Abel Ferrara has a history with the festival, going back to The Addiction in 1995. Meanwhile, the film’s other subject, storied musician Patti Smith, whose performances are interwoven with footage Ferrara shot in Ukraine throughout Turn in the Wound, is arguably more popular round these parts than she is in her native land. Last year the Berlinale made room for Sean Penn’s roughly received Superpower, another American filmmaker’s documentary about Ukraine that boasts interviews with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy just like this does. It’s practically a Berlinale tradition now. 

A year on from Superpower’s premiere and two years into the war, Ferrara’s securing of an interview with Zelenskyy, which takes up about 10 minutes of screen time maximum, doesn’t seem much like a journalistic coup these days. The president, after all, is understandably keen to reach Western hearts and minds any way he can in order to keep sympathy and support flowing. (And who knows? Maybe he’s a big fan of King of New York and Bad Lieutenant.) Either way, Zelenskyy’s insightful words about the short-sighted folly of Russia’s invasion and awed praise for Ukrainians’ strength of character, expressed in English that gets more fluent every month, will do no harm to his reputation.

In truth, while this doesn’t even come close to the reportage standard set by Oscar-nominee 20 Days in Mariupol, and isn’t even as good a doc as Ferrara at his best (see Chelsea on the Rocks), it’s a better work than most of the director’s recent efforts, and less self-aggrandizing than Penn’s Superpower. Sure, Ferrara is visible on screen, and is even seen getting ornery about delays while waiting to be interviewed for a Ukrainian news program. But once the interview gets going, he summarizes his reasons for coming to Ukraine with an honest admission that he’s no expert, he just wants to understand why this is going on.

It’s a little bit personal for him given that his current wife, Cristina Chiriac, and their daughter Anna (both seen elsewhere in the film) are from Moldavia, a region that could be next on Putin’s to-invade list. “I’m an instinctual filmmaker, so I just felt I need to be here now, with my camera, in a humble way,” he explains to the journalist while the camera, operated by another, bobs and wobbles about like it’s strapped to a fly. Humble, yes, but also a little bit inept.

A similar, one-take-and-done approach is visible throughout as Ferrara and his small crew set out to interview a number of regular people on the streets about their experiences. There are never any subtitles revealing what destroyed city they’re standing in, or who is being interviewed, but perhaps that’s the price of being instinctual. For their part, the interviewees speak mostly calmly and matter-of-factly about how Russians invaded their streets, destroyed their homes or, as one woman explains with barely suppressed despair, vaporized buildings so thoroughly that there was nothing inside to be found; people were effectively wearing the dead as dust on their bodies. It’s not clear whether the shots of corpses in the streets are snippets of archive footage or were shot by Ferrara’s crew. Given the camera isn’t flaying around and stays in focus, I’m guessing they’re bits of archive footage.

Any yet somehow, thanks to edit suite magic (Leonardo Daniel Bianchi takes the editorial credit), some kind of thematic coherence emerges from the morass of material. The Ukrainians’ love for their children rhymes with the footage we see elsewhere of Patti Smith performing with her daughter Jesse Paris Smith, who plays the piano onstage with Patti. Near the end, she performs an a cappella version of “Wing,” a song she wrote for Jesse when the latter was a baby, in front of a crowd, and its words about how being free (“It was beautiful, it was beautiful,” go the lyrics) become a loving dirge for absent loved ones. Just to tie the Smith material closer to the Ukraine footage, we see the aforementioned child of Ferrara and his wife being entertained by Smith backstage before a gig; Smith apologizes for the fact that she only has water, peanuts and a little fruit to share with the kid.

Otherwise, the sequences where we see Smith and her collaborators performing, rehearsing and recording in Paris feel only tenuously connected to the stories of slaughter, the images of death and destruction. That said, there’s certainly a lot of darkness in her own lyrics and poetry, as well as writings by Rene Daumal, Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud that she recites as part of the show. Now into her late 70s, Smith has settled into a very distinctive, rapturous kind of style, which oscillates between singing and recitation. Her voice and presence are as still plangent and strong, and with her long grey hair, plaited into braids, and rock-chick style, she comes across as the coolest grandma at the peace rally. I’m not sure what she and Ferrara have contributed with this film to the Ukrainian cause, but it’s watchable at least.