(Berlin) Sean Penn was with Volodymyr Zelensky the night Russian bombs started falling on Kyiv. “You will say that you were in the presidential palace, not in a bunker”, suggested an assistant to the Ukrainian president.
Two days before the start of the war, the American actor still believed – like many observers – that Vladimir Putin would not dare to invade Ukraine. He was not there to document a possible armed conflict, but to paint the portrait of an unlikely president. An actor like him, who played on TV a history teacher catapulted by chance to the presidency of Ukraine. Before reality catches up with fiction.
Superpower, a documentary that Sean Penn co-directed with Aaron Kaufman, presented out of competition at the Berlinale, has become a very different object, by force of circumstance. It’s a unique look behind the scenes of the war, at a pivotal moment. And, above all, a tribute to the glory of an actor and of the Ukr… Sorry. Sean Penn. It’s a movie celebrating Sean Penn. It is he, the actor to whom we pay tribute, not Volodymyr Zelensky.
This narcissistic exercise of more than two hours – designed as a manual on The Ukrainian conflict for dummies – quickly becomes a pretext to show us that Sean Penn had a role to play in the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion. that the actor of Mystic River – he offered his Oscar to Zelensky – is part of history (with a capital H of course). I was there, I saw.
The documentary is built like a suspense, with political thriller music in support, around the meeting (barely a few minutes long) with Zelensky on the evening of February 24, 2022. Will it take place or not? While waiting to find out (discloser: the answer is in the first sentence of this column), Sean Penn is on stage.
PHOTO FROM THE BERLINALE
Sean Penn and Volodymyr Zelensky
We see him, constantly on screen, meeting political scientists, journalists, soldiers, mercenaries, drinking a shot of vodka, wondering if he should leave or stay, smoking a cigarette, talking on the phone while trying to intercede with the American government, drink a vodka and tonic, hang on to your vaporizer, go to the front line and do everything in your power, except shoot the soldiers opposite, so that peace will come to the world.
A man on a mission, with a dye as bad as his alcohol-softened diction. A humanist described as a pacifist – he co-founded the humanitarian organization CORE after the earthquake in Haiti – turned warmonger who glorifies the military (he goes to a school that trains young soldiers from 13 to 16 years). A fanboy completely obsessed with his subject, which no longer asks questions, but merely salamalecs. An actor who plays the reporter gonzoà la Hunter S. Thompson, but which has sunk into obsequiousness.
There’s a particularly telling scene near the end of the film where Penn agrees to be interviewed by populist host Sean Hannity on Fox News. We then see Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives, telling Hannity that this is arguably the most important interview of his career. The montage then shows us images of pro-Ukrainian demonstrators in the streets of Moscow which suggest that it was thanks to the intervention of Sean Penn that Russian public opinion was mobilized. Nothing less. Give him the Nobel Peace Prize. It presses.
I’m not the only one who walked out of the screening of Superpower with the impression of having seen a propaganda film. “It is clear that the word ‘propaganda’ has a pejorative connotation. If showing the truth of the unity of Ukrainians in safeguarding what is most precious to them, freedom, is propaganda, then I am happy to be considered a propagandist! “, replied the actor and activist to a journalist who asked him the question on Saturday at a press conference.
“It’s a film that is biased because it’s a war that is biased,” admits Sean Penn. It has the merit of being clear. It doesn’t make Superpower a better movie. It’s a rough documentary, without a clear direction, which often features Sean Penn in anecdotal situations. If we take the slightest interest in the news, we don’t learn anything that we don’t already know. And the production is enough to make you dizzy even for those who don’t suffer from motion sickness (it’s co-produced by Vice…).
Of his meetings with President Zelensky, Penn retained only a few minutes in which we see him essentially moved, amazed, barely expressing the least coherent idea. For the rest, we have above all the impression that his project was motivated by the need to make his activism public and to act as a spokesperson in the West, and in particular in the United States, for the Ukrainian general staff. . “It is high time to provide Ukraine with long-range missiles,” he repeated several times at a press conference, a camouflage cap with the inscription “Killer Tacos” screwed on his head.
Volodymyr Zelensky, who saw the film last week – Sean Penn traveled to Kyiv to present it to him – spoke via satellite to the audience at the opening ceremony on Thursday evening at the Berlinale Palast. “We will win, and I know you will be convinced of it when you see the film Superpowerthe superpower of Ukraine,” he said.
“He is a man of heart and courage. He was born for this historic moment, ”believes Sean Penn, who specifies that with the exception of the birth of his children, he has never been more moved to meet someone in his entire life.
In a press conference, the actor and filmmaker called Vladimir Putin, whom he had already met with Jack Nicholson at the invitation of filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov, a close friend of the Russian president, a “war criminal” and ” filthy little bully”. It’s fair game.
“It’s hard for me to imagine reasonable people not seeing this as a criminal invasion,” he said. “In all this terror, there is something magical happening. We all need to be on the right side of history. »
Sean Penn is, of course, on the right side of history. The problem is that he does not seem to have understood that this story is not his.