Contemplating Chernobyl

Just as Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus were preparing to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the deadly Chernobyl nuclear accident (April 26, 1986), the world faced a harrowing reminder of the possibility of nuclear catastrophe, as Japan’s Fukushima plant experienced multiple partial meltdowns, spewing radioactive material into the air and water.

By some estimates, Chernobyl impacted some 10 million people in the European part of the former USSR, both in terms of critical radiation exposure and displacement. That impact, and the eerie yet invisible proximity of death in the immediate aftermath of Chernobyl’s explosion, take center stage in the new film, Innocent Saturday,* perhaps the first drama about Chernobyl made in Russia.

The Chernobyl accident occurred in the wee hours of a Saturday morning, a day off for workers in the town neighboring the plant, which ensured maximum radiation exposure for locals.

In the movie, Valerka (Anton Shagin) is a rather unlikable young careerist in the Communist Party. He is also one of the first to witness the blast at Chernobyl’s fourth reactor. “I’ll give up my party ticket,” he declares, wide-eyed, to local officials, promising not to tell anyone about the catastrophe. The film then turns silent as he sprints away from the blazing reactor. When he arrives in the town, it is waking up lazily to a nice spring day.

Many people expected the film, directed by art house screenwriter and second time director Alexander Mindadze, to be an action film or to at least to incorporate a social critique of the accident and the authorities’ silence, which damaged hundreds of thousands of people’s health. But instead Innocent Saturday is a gut-wrenching psychological study of a person torn apart by his knowledge. You can almost feel Valerka’s wobbly legs as the hand-held camera follows him through the weekend crowds, as his confusion and a sense of doom shrouds the movie’s senseless dialogs.

Valerka attempts to flee the doomed city three times, but each time is held back, be it by the banalities of a broken heel on his girlfriend’s shoe, or by a persistent and unexplained connection to his nonconformist friends who play in a band and tease him for toeing the party line. Innocent Saturday passes and Valerka is still in the town as the reactor’s flames begin shooting fountains of radiation into the atmosphere.

The Chernobyl disaster also dispersed a worldwide cloud of fear, leading to the suspension and halting of many nuclear power plants’ construction. This fear was only beginning to dissipate 25 years on (Russia for one has been contemplating a “nuclear renaissance” over the next 15 years, building dozens of new nuclear reactors at home and abroad).

The nuclear industry is notoriously secretive (not just in Russia), and the public somehow becomes blissfully ignorant of the possible fallout, invisible even in the worst of accidents.

Innocent Saturday is particularly powerful for showing how people can embrace their ignorance, even if they suspect the worst. When Valerka ends up at a drunken party after the wedding of a buddy and his pregnant girlfriend, the buddy confesses that he too knows about the explosion. Valerka half finishes a question about the couple’s unborn child and the buddy freezes in terror. Moments later the buddy is shown binging on Olivier salad before passing out on the shoulder of his unsuspecting young wife.

One day after reactor 3 at Fukushima exploded, Belarus signed an agreement with Russia to build a nuclear plant in the Belarusan city of Ostrovets. Soon thereafter, the Belarusan media reported that Innocent Saturday had been banned in the country.