MUR. You [Romance] on the Big Screen: The phenomenon of Ukrainian neophytism

The rap opera MUR. You [Romance] grew out of the album by MUR, You [Romance], which consists of 18 songs united by a single storyline about the poets of the Executed Renaissance. The musicians recorded the album together with Serhiy Zhadan, Yevheniy Yanovych, the bands Hatespeech, NAZVA, and other artists.

The theatrical production was the next step in the development of this large-scale project. The MUR team travelled all over Ukraine with the rap opera, and buying tickets for their performance was an asterisked task everywhere. In the end, the logical continuation was to create a film version of the musical for those who did not get to the theatre. 

Filming a performance is a well-established practice; in Britain, for example, cinematic versions of popular plays are commonplace, and some, such as Hamlet starring Benedict Cumberbatch, have even made their way to Ukrainian cinemas. In Ukrainian cinema, this is also a tribute to tradition. After all, the first Ukrainian films made in the early twentieth century were films of performances by the Theatre of Luminaries. As Mike Johansen, the poet of the Executed Renaissance, said: "The best theatre is a movie theatre."

The filming of You [Romance] was quite complicated and meticulous: according to the team, the musical was shot with 12 cameras over three days, meaning that the actors performed for three days in a row until it was completely filmed in the right shapes and angles. Here we should pay tribute to the editor Maria O'Reilly, who managed to make a full-fledged film performance out of the three filmed performances without losing the pace and integrity of the acting. MUR. You [Romance] on the Big Screen really looks like a coherent and balanced film performance that keeps the viewer in suspense, keeps the pace up and burns with visuals.

The performance is based on the aforementioned album You [Romance], which tells the story of the poets of the Executed Renaissance. The protagonist of the rap opera is Pavlo Tychyna, who appears as a Soviet classic and a young Symbolist poet. Alongside him are the characters of Mykhaylo Semenko, Mykola Khvylovyy, Volodymyr Sosyura, Les Kurbas, Ostap Vyshnya emerge — as well as a symbolic Chekist.

The play is really bright and, importantly, works on clear symbolism, particularly in the costumes. Semenko here wears a pink fur coat and boots to emphasise his tendency to shock. Khvylovyy wears a coat with white and red sides, which seems to show his dual nature, torn between Ukrainian patriotism and Bolshevism. The young Tychyna wears a white knitted sweater, and the old poet wears a red oilcloth coat with a giant papier-mâché order over the sweater. This outfit tells us that the poet's talent disappeared under a layer of communist propaganda. In general, the image of Tychyna in the play is as strange as possible: he is accused of all possible sins for collaborating with the Soviet government, then he is acquitted, and then accused again. In this bipolarity, the intention is not fully understood, so who is Tychyna in this play: a positive character with a difficult fate or a negative character who betrayed ideals.

The rest of the characters in the musical are much simpler and more transparent. MUR. You [Romance] on the Big Screen deconstructs its characters, trying to put them in the context of contemporary events. That's why Sosyura is fighting in the Third Assault Force, and Kurbas is holding the ‘cultural front’. However, this film performance is a rather poster-like spectacle: behind broad strokes full of pathos, emotionality and grotesque, the creators of the musical lose this deconstruction and mix it with real life dramas of the most prominent Ukrainian writers of the first half of the twentieth century. 

The main advantage of MUR. You [Romance] on the Big Screen is its timeliness. Both the theatrical and film productions. The full-scale invasion created a large wave of neophytes of Ukrainian culture and history. Thousands of people began to re-identify themselves as Ukrainians and reassemble their own cultural identity. This process requires a lot of intellectual work on oneself. The MUR band is a phenomenon of this neophyte phenomenon, because it emerged as a reaction to a full-scale invasion. And in this context, MUR. You [Romance] on the Big Screen is a major popularisation project that finds amateurish and simple, but effective ways to encourage interest in Ukrainian culture. 

MUR. You [Romance] on the Big Screen is not a perfect project. There are banal rhymes, factual errors, and a vague plot. However, this vivid spectacle brings the poetry of the last century to life, giving it a surprisingly powerful sound at parties and in players, broadcast on big and small screens. And this is perhaps the main merit and success of this project.