Do You Love Me? review: Beautiful cinematography makes up for a lacking script | MFF 2024

Set one year before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Toya Noyabryova’s Do You Love Me? is a coming-of-age story following protagonist Kira (Karyna Khymchuk), a whimsical, 17-year-old aspiring actress. Do You Love Me? opens at Kira’s parents’ wedding anniversary but soon her world falls apart when a young woman approaches her to reveal her father’s affair. Kira begins to spiral, and her carefree nature and hunger for love becomes detrimental.

Amongst the many films on offer across the week at Manchester Film Festival, Do You Love Me? is one of three Ukrainian films on the list. I feel that national displacement and subsequent personal loss of identity is an extremely polemical and current topic. The film has the capacity to share a story experienced by hundreds in this moment through the lens of a girl in 1990’s Soviet Ukraine.

Do You Love Me? is heavy and unrelentingly sad. The darkness starts with divorce, continues through to attempted suicide, and then follows through to poverty, and grief. The film’s title Do You Love Me? is a continual and harrowing theme of the film, where Kira asks each character she loves dearly the same question, and yet each one denies her question and refuses to answer.

A well-executed theme of the film is positioning Kira as vulnerable despite her manic desperation for freedom. I found it extremely important that Misha, Kira’s lover for the best part of the film, was never fully romanticised, as the two meet at Kira’s suicide attempt, when he (a paramedic) revives her and instantly sexualises her drugged and scantily clad body.

Aged 25, Misha takes advantage of Kira’s naivety, and the film works to follow Kira’s perspective in initially romanticising her freedom and newfound independence in her relationship, only for it to crumble when she sees the reality of poverty, isolation, and Misha’s lust rather than love for her.

However, the continual denial of love for Kira felt somewhat overstated. Her father’s denial was brilliantly displayed, with a gradual removal and her eventual understanding of his own instability, but her fraught relationship with her mother could have been far better explored, as could her relationship with her grandparents and her friends.

Her friends felt ultimately superficial to the plot, as did Kira’s aspiration to become an actress, and scenes at school seemed to take away from the key theme of isolation, national poverty, and hunger – for food, love, and escape. In centring so intensely on Kira’s experience, Do You Love Me? felt sometimes slow, and clues of national suffering beyond Kira were superficial and not explored to their fullest capacity, which could have made the film spectacular.

The cinematography was fantastic, the simplistic costume and styling choices were effective, and the minimal soundtrack felt intimate. Do You Love Me? is moving in many places and relentlessly bleak, ultimately, it is emotionally led but its allusions to a wider national history fell flat.

3/5

Do You Love Me? was screened as part of Manchester Film Festival 2024