Review of The Great Water (2004) by Jonathon C — 25 Dec 2008

This is a film that is guaranteed to absolutely mystify 99.9% of viewers of a non-Eastern European (communist) back-ground. I could be mistaken in my own understanding of this film, but having read much literature by Solzhenitsyn in recent years, I saw in this film a magnificent allegory of the spiritual condition of communist eastern Europe generally. Every scene in a supposed "orphanage" signifying the dramatic "re-education" of the masses ensuring the absolutes of communist ideology were sacrosanct to the state. The perverse morphing of the Cult of Stalin (Tito) with the mythology of the Great Patriotic War (WW2 for the rest of us), symbolized by a disgusting sex scene between a disfigured Red Army (or Partisan) veteran and a teenage girl of the "Stalin (Tito) Youth", was very off-putting, but it was not to be taken at face value- it was a symbolic union.

The mysterious presence of a beautiful woman with a bible and the "voyeurism" of the two young boys of the orphanage that challenge the communist orthodoxies taught in the orphanage with their orthodox spirituality appears to symbolize the undercurrent of the free thinking minority that sought to reclaim their nation's hitherto cut off spiritual heritage. A very pregnant film this was indeed.