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The Jump

This was the 7th film I saw at Revelation and it's a pretty amazing story. I reckon it shows Desert One how to take a balanced view of a historical event (but more of that later). The plan is to do a summary blog and pod of the festival in the coming days but for now, here's a full size review of The Jump.

The story of Simas Kudirka plays out like a made for TV, cold war potboiler and would be hard to believe if it wasn’t historical fact. In November 1970, Kudirka, a Lithuanian sailor on a Soviet fishing boat, jumped onto a U.S. Coast Guard vessel while crew members of the two ships were conducting high level fishing discussions. Claiming asylum, Kudirka was initially hidden by the American crew, until orders came to hand him back to the Soviets. And this is only the beginning of the story. After Simas is returned to his vessel, his fate unknown to the West, word gets out and protests spark up throughout the U.S. These are led by the Lithuanian-American diaspora, who maintain that the U.S. doesn’t turn away refugees, and that they, in fact, may have breached international law in doing so with Kudirka. U.S. Presidents, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford make appearances in archive footage and Henry Kissinger is actually interviewed for the film. Some of the most affecting segments are the statements given by the crew of the Coast Guard ship, especially the captain, who has had to live with his decision to follow those questionable orders.

The film reconstructs the ‘jump’ in a novel way, by having 85 year old Kudirka retrace his steps on the actual ship involved, the USCGC Vigilant. He’s a charming, sincere man and his fearlessness and determination to be treated fairly shine through all the political machinations. He mentions that when he decided to defect, he had no thoughts about his family, his friends, any repercussions, just that he had to get away. It’s a salient point that, by sheer coincidence, a member of his family proves instrumental in gaining his eventual freedom from the gulags.

The Jump has relevance today, as it shows the ideal of an American society that is morally sound in principle, one that allows the freedom to protest, the existence of many strands of activism and the framework to accept refugees. The director, Giedre Zickyte, balances his politics well, showing that Kudirka’s desperate need was not necessarily to get to the U.S., but to get away from the U.S.S.R. There’s one significant sequence that shows a TV news report of Kudirka raising the U.S. flag at his apartment in New York. The news voice-over announces that he does this every day, yet an old friend he ‘meets’ on the street intimates that they only did that for the cameras. Mirroring this, Kudirka is later seen raising a Lithuanian flag back in his home country after noting that the U.S. is “beautiful, but it’s not for me.” Later, we see a simple scene that neatly encapsulates the film. Kudirka watches the actual TV film of his life, The Defection of Simas Kudirka, and half-complains, through teary eyes, that it’s “so American in style”.

See also:

Martin Ritt's The Spy Who Came In from the Cold (1965) is fantastically bleak (and based on a John le Carre novel - RIP). And it might be fun to check out the dramatised version of Kudirka's story, with Alan Arkin in the lead, The Defection of Simas Kudirka (1978), directed by David Lowell Rich. I haven't seen it but I'm guessing it's bobbins.

[This review was also published on the Film Ink website - https://www.filmink.com.au/reviews/the-jump/]

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