The 3 Rooms of Melancholia

An extraordinary film, Finnish director Pirjo Honkasalo's The 3 Rooms of Melancholia looks at the impact of war on children, with the Russian-Chechen conflict serving as a microcosm. Rather than taking a straight narrative approach, the documentary is presented in an impressionistic tripartite structure, with the first and last episodes in color and the middle segment in black-and-white. In the first part, titled “Longing,” the setting is a Russian military academy where young cadets—aged 11 through 13, mostly orphans and children of parents no longer able to care for them—are being trained to become little soldiers. The second section, “Breathing,” shot in the devastated Chechen capital of Grozny, observes a woman removing three wailing children from a bleak apartment—where their mother lies desperately ill—to transport them to an orphanage she operates in adjacent Ingushetia. “Remembering,” the final sequence, features two Chechen boys already in Ingushetia being initiated into local rituals meant to prepare them for religious commitment and combat. In all three a female narrator offers brief, dispassionate remarks on the young subjects' tragic pasts, but most of the content is in the form of haunting images, and there's a powerful linkage in the fact that the children in both the first and third segments watch television reports of the terrorist assault on the Dubrovka Theatre in Moscow—precisely the sort of incident that's likely to make them battlefield enemies in the future. The 3 Rooms of Melancholia captures the grim reality of the ways that long-term hostility leads to generations of conflict and suffering, and does so far more powerfully than conventional didactic documentaries. Highly recommended. Editor's Choice. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)