Nightmare echoes of the Holodomor

Agnieszka Holland's film Mr Jones (Polish title Obywatel Jones) is not perfect but it does stand out as an important film for our time. It tells the story of British journalist Gareth Jones, one of the first Westerners to report the scale of the famine set in train by Stalin in 1932-33 in Ukraine.

It is a film that resonates today as journalists and politicians conveniently side-step the truth for the sake of expedience - blinded to it by greed, ideology, laziness or just unwillingness to rock the boat. Parallels to today's politics - though far less murderous - are not lost on the audience.

Trying to tell a story as wide-sweeping and horrific as the Holodomor in a movie two hours and 21 minutes long is a demanding task. It depends on being able to break it down into bite-sized scenes that strung together over the film's length show a continuous narrative unfolding.

One criticism is that the actors portraying the starving Ukrainian peasants did not look starving enough; the emaciation that one sees in the few photos to have made it out of that hell is not evident in the film. But overall, the film's klimat or atmosphere is chillingly nightmarish. The brutal realities of Stalin's USSR, overseen by an army of thugs, informers and murderers, a landscape bereft of sunlight, Moscow a city of architectural monumentalism, dwarfing Soviet citizens. The technology of the time, put to use to invigilate and coerce a nation, is nicely shown too.

Mr Jones draws on history but uses some narrative ploys that undermine authenticity. The film suggests that David Lloyd George was the British prime minister in 1933. "By the 1930s Lloyd George was on the margins of British politics" (Wikipedia). The prime minister at the time was Ramsay McDonald. Throughout the film we see George Orwell writing Animal Farm, an allegory on Soviet communism; a book that was written ten years later (1943-44) and not published until 1945, ten years after Jones's death. It is unlikely that Orwell ever met Jones.

However, Walter Duranty, the British-American journalist, Moscow correspondent of the New York Times is portrayed with greater historical accuracy, being the villain of the piece. Duranty preferred to lie on Stalin's behalf to the Western world, denying the man-made famine in Ukraine. It was an event on a scale of inhumanity and barbarism on a par with the Holocaust.

Music - Antoni Łazarkiewicz - that recurring 12-note piano motif sounds very much like the motif in Carter Burwell's soundtrack for the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man (2009). But the Western jazz of the day, in its full decadence, clashes with haunting Ukrainian folk songs about the hunger and its effect on the people.

The film is truly international in scale, set in London, Moscow, Ukraine and Wales; the dialogue in four languages. Man's inhumanity to man and the contrast between the powerful and the poor is present in both the United Kingdom and in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics - but the latter is in an utterly different world of brutal inhumanity. Agnieszka Holland makes the point that during the Great Depression, many Western idealists, seeing the human suffering around them, looked to Stalin and the USSR as the future - how wrong they were.

Having watched the film in Kinoteka (within the Stalinist Palace of Culture), I stepped out into the colossal marbled hall outside the screening room, amid its massive columns and high ceilings and felt as if I were back in the movie; the purpose of Socialist-Realist architecture was to oppress through scale.

Three nights in a row I had nightmares which touched on this film. I commend it thoroughly, despite some shortcomings.

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