Marija picks the worst possible moment to tell her husband she wants a divorce. One day later, Russia invades Ukraine. How to Divorce During the War is a dry, razor-sharp comedy about a marriage collapsing while the world does the same, and about how much room your own heartbreak is still allowed to take up once a war has started a few hundred kilometres down the road.
Vilnius, February 2022. Marija is in her early thirties, earns the money and runs the Lithuanian branch of a thoroughly joyless content agency. Her husband Vytas was once a promising film director, but these days he is mainly a stay-at-home dad who spends his time ordering hipster beanies online. After twelve years, she has had enough. She tells him in the car, in a scene that drags on so painfully that you almost look away.
The invasion begins the next morning. And with it comes the real awkwardness: how do you get divorced decently when everybody around you is talking about one thing only?
That is where the sharpest jokes live. Marija and Vytas are not just dismantling their marriage, they are also busy showing the world how much they care. Whoever shouts their solidarity loudest wins. Companies put up billboards to prove they are thinking of Ukraine. And meanwhile, as the director tells it, half of Lithuania was asking itself with every purchase: do I buy a pair of trousers, or do I donate?
Their young daughter Dovilė, for her part, comforts herself after the news of the divorce by switching on the television to watch the war. War, it turns out, can feel more familiar than a row in your own house.
At the other end of the spectrum are Vytas’s parents, who watch Russian television without blinking and reckon the truth probably lies somewhere in the middle. They are, naturally, exactly the people he has to move back in with.
Blaževičius films all of this strikingly coolly. Wide frames, a camera that stays put, hardly a close-up in sight. You are not pulled in, you are left to watch. That is deliberate. “I wanted to create space for the viewer to think about what is happening and about what they would have done in this situation,” he said at Sundance, where the film won the directing award. So melodrama is off the table. What you get instead is something more uncomfortable: all the room you need to recognise your own behaviour.
Halfway through, plenty starts to shift. Who is in the right in this marriage suddenly looks a lot less settled than it did at the start.
How to Divorce During the War is funny in the way that makes you laugh and then feel awkward about it a second later. Because the question underneath is one you would rather not be asked: how do you carry on living comfortably when you know exactly what is happening just down the road?
