The four tales told in “Bad Roads,” Natalya Volorzhbit’s bleak and unnerving first feature, add up to a startlingly grim panorama of life during wartime. We are in the battle-scarred Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, sometime after the spring of 2014, when tensions between Ukrainian government forces and Russian-backed separatists flared into armed conflict, but long before the terrible escalations of the last few months. Like Sergei Loznitsa’s recently rereleased “Donbass,” though less sprawling in scope and more intimate in feel, this omnibus work functions as both a lament and a prophecy. With each story, Volorzhbit pulls us a little deeper into the heart of contested, occupied territory, where soldiers and civilians dwell in unbearable tension, women are grievously exploited and, as the title suggests, wrong turns and ill-advised journeys abound.
The first unlucky traveler we meet is a middle-aged school principal (Igor Koltovskyy) driving through a security checkpoint. It’s a routine trek that quickly goes south when he can’t find his passport; his mild inebriation doesn’t help his case. As he pleads with two armed soldiers (Andrey Lelyukh and Vladimir Gurin), you fear, not for the last time in this movie, that impatience will tilt into aggression and violence. But Volorzhbit has a gift for building tension through narrative restraint and mordant humor; she also has a keen sense of misdirection. What gives the story its moral sting is the moment the principal recognizes — or thinks he recognizes — a young woman in a soldier’s nearby bunker, the latest living casualty of a war without end.
Does the principal really see what he thinks he sees? “Bad Roads,” which was Ukraine’s recent Oscar submission for international feature, suggests the question is irrelevant: Whatever’s happening in this particular instance, it speaks to the long-term trauma of an ongoing military presence and the malevolence that can seep, without warning, into everyday encounters. This first story, which takes place under a hot sun and centers on three men, is both a prologue and a bit of an anomaly: It establishes a theme — the plight of women in wartime — that will be given more unflinching attention in the next three vignettes, each of which focuses on a woman’s experience and unfolds under cover of darkness.
