There are films where you wait for something to happen.
In Three Days a different feeling gradually takes hold: everything has already happened.
Nobody told the characters what it was.
They still walk the streets. They meet. They look at each other. They go into places and come out of them. They try to be near one another.
But the world around them looks as though the reason for all these actions has been forgotten.
Only the inertia is left.
People after the future
That is probably why the film seems empty at first.
The brain expects the usual bargain: I give you my time, you give me an event.
Bartas does not make that bargain.
He leaves you in front of people who do not know what they are waiting for either.
And after a while you start noticing a strange thing: their inaction is not empty.
They are like radio receivers still holding a frequency after the transmitter has gone.
Sometimes static.
Sometimes someone’s voice.
Sometimes another person.
But the signal keeps getting weaker.
Golubeva’s face
With Katerina Golubeva it is nearly impossible to separate the performance from the presence.
It does not look as though she is showing a state.
She is simply inside it.
That is why you want to look at her face longer than the plot requires. Not because it explains something. The opposite.
It gives nothing away voluntarily.
In ordinary cinema an actor’s face often helps you follow what is happening: fear, love, suspicion, a decision.
Here the face becomes one more place you look into and get no answer.
Like a window at night.
Sometimes you see yourself reflected in it.
The city promises nothing
The most frightening thing in this world is not even the ruin.
Ruin at least implies a catastrophe.
What is worse here is the sense that this could continue indefinitely.
Nobody comes to save the city.
Nobody announces a new era.
No music tells you an important scene is about to begin.
The world simply exists after its own explanation.
That is probably why the old industrial spaces here look not like sets but like the remains of some idea.
All of it was built for a reason once.
People came in the morning.
Worked.
Went home.
Planned something.
Now the form is still there and the reason is gone.
And a person inside a form like that looks especially small.
Three days
The title seems to promise a fixed span.
Three days, and then something changes.
But time in the film almost loses its direction.
The first day does not lead to the second.
The second does not prepare the third.
The moments simply accumulate.
And suddenly what the characters are waiting for becomes clear.
They are not waiting for a specific event.
They are waiting for life to acquire a direction again.
That wait is more familiar than one would like.
Sometimes a person thinks he needs money, a job, another city, love, a holiday, a new country.
What he is actually waiting for is the moment when a sequence of events becomes a story again.
So that today would mean something in relation to tomorrow.
But that moment may never arrive.
A weak signal
So I do not think Three Days is about emptiness.
Emptiness would be simpler.
There is something else here.
Very faint.
People still look for one another.
They watch.
They stay close.
They try to touch.
As though human closeness were the last protocol still running after the rest of the system has been shut down.
Maybe that is the film’s signal.
Not “everything is lost.”
And not “everything will be fine.”
A far less comfortable thought:
the world can stop promising you a future, and life somehow continues anyway.
You will get up.
Go somewhere.
See another person.
Look at them.
And for a few seconds, through the interference, an image appears again.