Ukraine faces decisive months ahead as key allies gear up for crunch elections. While early presidential campaigning in the US and a looming general election in Poland will grab the international headlines, a snap election in Slovakia on 30 September may prove every bit as consequential. 

With Robert Fico — Slovakia’s former prime minister and one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Ukrainian war effort — poised to win the vote, a change of government in Bratislava could have a profound effect on EU policymaking. Fico has promised that if his party makes it into government “we will not send a single bullet to Ukraine,” proudly proclaiming that “I allow myself to have a different opinion to that of the United States” on the war.  

Fico has also claimed on the campaign trail that “war always comes from the West and peace from the East,” and that “what is happening today is unnecessary killing, it is the emptying of warehouses to force countries to buy more American weapons.” Such statements have resulted in him being blacklisted by Kyiv as a spreader of Russian propaganda.  

Yet the former prime minister spearheads a new brand of Left-wing, anti-American populism that has become a powerful force in Central Europe since the war began. Perceptions that “the Americans occupy us” — as one MP in Fico’s Smer party evocatively put it — are shared with a similar groundswell of anti-Western opinion in the neighbouring Czech Republic.  

Yet Smer has been handed a chance to gain power thanks to the chaos which has engulfed Slovakia’s pro-EU, pro-Western forces. Personal grievances coupled with serious policy errors tore apart a four-party coalition formed after elections in 2020, leaving Fico to capitalise on heightened mistrust in establishment politics. Smer is expected to become the nation’s largest party after this month’s election, with an anticipated 20% of the vote.  

Whatever the specific makeup of the new government, if Smer is the largest party it will likely pursue a foreign policy similar to that of Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary. A halt to until-now generous Slovak arms shipments to Ukraine is Fico’s central electoral pledge, while the arrival on the scene of another Orbán-style government prepared to obstruct EU aid efforts for Ukraine would create a serious headache. That is particularly the case as Brussels struggles to win support for both short and long-term war funding commitments. 

Victory for Fico would also amplify Orbán’s scepticism about the overall Western narrative on Ukraine — a scepticism which the Hungarian Prime Minister recently conveyed to Western conservatives during an interview with Tucker Carlson. Orbán portrayed Ukraine’s attempts to win back the territories taken by Russia as ultimately hopeless and claimed that Donald Trump’s promise to end the war quickly makes him “the man who can save the Western world”. 

Like Trump in America and Orbán in Europe, Fico is hated with a passion by establishment forces. But in Slovakia, the pro-Western establishment itself has become so mistrusted that power may soon pass to a man intent on shattering what’s left of European unity on Ukraine. 

Clare Binns, the creative director of Picturehouse Cinemas, has this week urged directors and producers to make shorter films if they want them to be screened in theatres and to perform well at the box office. This fills me with hope of a sea change.

Last year, while sitting through Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another and Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, clocking in respectively at 162 and 149 minutes, I wondered when on earth the narrative was going to get to the point instead of just continuing to be a chaotic “ride”. It seemed like the directorial superego that should have said firmly and repeatedly “No, that isn’t needed: cut it”, had been suppressed forever. This came after also seeing the two Dune movies, 156- and 166-minutes-long, Killers of the Flower Moon by Martin Scorsese, 206 minutes, and Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist — a pitiless 215 minutes.

How did directors become so self-indulgent as to produce such punishingly long films? Watching these sagas, I am often reminded of a scene from Curtis Hanson’s film Wonder Boys (2000), in which a professor of creative writing unable to finish his own novel is told by one of his students that even though his book is beautiful, it’s “very detailed”. “You know,” the student continues, “with the genealogies of everyone’s horses, and the dental records, and so on. I could be wrong, but it sort of reads in places like you didn’t make any choices. At all.”

Take One Battle After Another, a film at once unrelenting and flabby. There is a strong sense throughout that Anderson’s creative energy is going into cramming in every possible film reference, ad nauseam. A scene set in a supermarket is merely a nod to Billy Wilder’s classic film noir Double Indemnity — a luxurious display of the director’s cultural hinterland; it does nothing to power the action.

I had wondered if — especially in the wake of the pandemic having kept us all at home watching films on streaming platforms — film producers felt that in exchange for buying expensive cinema tickets, filmgoers should be rewarded with a whole lot of movie time, giving them more bang for their buck. But as it turns out, the interminable film-fleuve is in fact a bad business model for cinemas, because the number of possible daily screenings is so few. If cinemas are going to continue to recover after their long closure, they need to have more screenings of shorter films.

This does not mean that some films cannot have a longer running time, but this really does have to be earned. It takes exceptional talent to produce a film as sinewy, strange and compelling as, for example Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, 163 minutes). Nor is it necessarily true that, having been permanently rewired by watching short videos on TikTok, we have now become incapable of concentrating on feature-length films. Clare Binns also notes, interestingly, that visitors to Picturehouse cinemas are showing a renewed interest in screen classics — shorter films of a high calibre.

The time has come, now that streaming is installed in our cultural practices, to decouple it clearly from that special other thing, the cinematic experience: where you look up, as Jean-Luc Godard said, at a screen that is bigger than you and give yourself over to an uninterrupted communal experience. At the cinema, you are not at home, able to pause the film or get up to get a snack. No, you are “out”, while being enclosed in a sacred space that demands your hallucinated attention, and that experience is now ripe for re-wilding and re-weirding.