The Search isn't quite like any film Michel Hazanavicius' has made before, being a dark and complicated narrative centered around the second Chechen war of 1999. The film is centered around four intersecting stories of four individuals, each of which find themselves relatively helpless in the grasp of Warfare. The narrative is driven by the story of Hadji, a traumatized ten-year-old boy, who is orphaned after the senseless murder of his parents at the hands of the Russian army. Alone and terrified, the boy ventures across war-torn Chechnya, forced to fend for himself until meeting Carole, an NGO worker who is compiling a UN report about the worsening humanitarian crisis in Chehnya. While Michel Hazanavicius The Search certainly carries an Anti-War message, what makes this film an impressive achievement for the filmmaking is the film's ability to view this armed conflict from lots of varying perspectives, which not only keeps the film engaging, but offers a pensive look at War from all angles. With Carole, The Search taps into a fundamental problem with humanity as whole, showing the detachment from atrocity many individuals have. The Search argues that everyone is in their own world, having their own concerns and problems, speaking to the darker nature of humanity and its inherent selfishness in being only concerned with what directly effects oneself. Carole's journey also exposes the endlessly infuriating political mess of these conflicts, showing a UN that condones the atrocities, while simultaneously unwilling to place the blame on anyone or anything. Through the mother-son type relationship that begins to develop between Carole and Hadji, The Search captures the deep emotional stress and devastation war can have on a young, impressionable child. While Carole tries and fails to get the UN to intervene, Hadji represents her one chance to make a difference in this conflict, being able to show him that there is still love and tenderness in this world of terror that he has been thrown into. While the story of Carole and Hadji is powerful and the central aspect of the film, I particularly found myself drawn to the story of Koia, a twenty-year-old Russian man, who "chooses" military service in order to circumvent a minor drug offence. Told though an intermingling narrative with Carole and Hadji's story arch, The Search captures how a young man in Koia can be slowly be hardened into a murderer. While one could certainly argue that this aspect of The Search is a bit overly-dramatic and manipulative, the film exposes the totalitarianism regime of the army, where Hadji is beaten and brutalized in boot camp that feels an awful lot like an assembly line for manufacturing the perfect killing machines. Violence and death are the only aspects that gain respect in the Soviet Army, with Koia's slow transformation into a hardened soldier being one of the most devastating aspects of the film. Michel Hazanvicius' The Search is another Anti-war film, but what separates it from the lot is instead of simply stating the obvious, that war is bad, it attempts to understand the conflict from all angles, being a pensive study of the darker side of humanity and the need for hope.
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June 2023
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