By Sandra Hall
★★★ M, 99 minutes
This international co-production is out to impress as Ukraine's Doctor Zhivago. It's set during The Great Famine of 1932-33, when Stalin's Soviets starved millions of Ukrainian farmers and their families with its genocidal policy of forced collectivisation.
Max Irons as Yuri in Bitter Harvest.Credit: Mark Tillie/Becker Film Group
But sitting at the centre of the tragedy is a love story between childhood sweethearts Yuri and Natalka, played by Britain's Max Irons (son of Jeremy) and Samantha Barks, who scored her screen breakthrough with her performance as Epomine, the young revolutionary in the Hugh Jackman-Russell Crowe film version of Les Miserables.
They're a beguiling pair but they're destined to spend half the movie apart. After a pastoral idyll shot in their village at harvest time with sunny backlighting and connotations of mellow fruitfulness, the Russians ride in and nothing is ever the same again.
Yuri begs Natalka to bolt with him and his friends to Kiev, where they plan to pursue lives of art and poetry but refusing to leave her injured mother, she insists Yuri go without her. This leaves her under the protection of Terence Stamp, cast as the implacable Ivan, Yuri's warrior grandfather, who can still wield a sabre with great elan. Which is fortunate, for Natalka inevitably attracts the attention of Sergei (Tamer Hassan), the sadistic Russian commissar who now controls the village.
The film was put together by a group of Canadian filmmakers of Ukrainian background. Writer Richard Bachynsky Hoover came up with the story and co-wrote the screenplay with director George Mendeluk and they've done an effective if predictable job of gilding history with melodrama as the script skips back and forth between the village and Kiev, where Yuri is admitted to the city's art academy with improbable promptness.
Here, too, however, the heavy hand of Communist uniformity is at work, and it's not long before his impressionistic efforts are condemned as degenerate. Out on the streets again, he and his pals set up their own revolutionary group only to be arrested, imprisoned and lined up for execution.
Mendeluk races us through his action-packed scenario. With a running time of 99 minutes, there is no time for David Lean-like flourishes or meditative pauses. We're sent speeding on our way with a full calendar of miraculous escapes, fortuitous coincidences and perilous train journeys across vast distances.
Yuri and Natalka will meet again. That we know. The rest lies in the ingenuity of the obstacles planted in their path. It's not Zhivago. The big picture is drawn a little too hastily for that. But it is a rousing tale with political pertinence, given the current state of relations between Russia and the Ukraine.