The Return (Vozvrashchenie)

 

 

THE RETURN (Vozvrashchenie)                  A                                                                              Russia  (106 mi)  2003  d:  Andrei Zvyagintsev

Why did you come back?  Why?  Why did you come get us?  You don’t need us.  We were fine without you, with Mom and Gran.  Why did you come back?  Why did you take us with you? What do you need us for?                    —Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov)

Described by this first time director as “a mythological look at human life,” this is one of the more starkly austere and emotionally spare films one could see, completely absent of anything unnecessary, but always direct and to the point, given metaphysical implications, reminiscent of an earlier, somewhat similar film, Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s DISTANT (Uzak) (2002) that accentuates an excruciating loneliness, as the feelings in this film are so grim and remote, like a poetic glimpse into the human soul.  Remarkable for its spare storytelling that relies upon long, wordless sequences, the beauty of its stark reality is shockingly emphasized, like a Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness journey into the unknown, where one comes face to face with their ultimate fears.  What’s also surprising is the amount of unanswered questions raised by this film, which remain unresolved mysteries through the end, deeply entrenched in a primal ambiguity.  Structured into a series of episodes, the film marks seven days, each identified by intertitles, beginning with the introduction of two young brothers, Andrei (Vladimir Garin) and Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov), ages 15 and 13, who bicker and fight, like brothers do, but they’re also symbiotically attached, cut from the same cloth, demonstrating an intense closeness.  An early scene shows a group of young boys jumping off a tower into the sea, calling anyone who can’t do it a coward, so all but the youngest succeed, leaving Vanya temporarily stranded atop the tower, unable to face his fears.  Hours later his mother (Natalia Vdovina) climbs up there to console her child shivering in the cold, offering maternal grace and a warm blanket, suggesting he’ll jump when he’s ready, reassuring him that everything’s all right.  But the kids tease him when they see him again, excluding him from their playful activities.  Offering something of a diversion, Andrei races him home, each ready to tell on the other, but their mother quiets them, as their father (Konstantin Lavronenko), absent for 12 years, has inexplicably returned, sleeping in their mother’s bed in an identical position of Andrea Mantegna’s 15^th century painting, The Lamentation of a Dead Christ, Lamentation by Andrea Mantegna.  The boys are struck by his physical presence before running upstairs to confirm his identity, viewing a photograph kept in an illustrated family Bible, known by only a single photograph.  This simple gesture has a way of aligning the two boys even closer, as they’ve been together through all the years the father was absent, both a bit stupefied by his presence.  Their mother offers them no clues.  Again, without any explanation, he takes the boys on a journey, presumably a fishing trip, where they slip further and further away from civilization, into the most remote wilderness, eventually landing on a desolate island where they pitch their tents.  The older brother is glad his father has returned, while the younger brother isn’t even sure if this is his father or not, thinking he may be leading them astray to slit their throats, for all he knows, and sulks and disobeys his father every chance he gets.  This father uses few words, but offers severe and sometimes brutal consequences for disobedient behavior, which includes smacking these kids around, bloodying their noses, leaving them out in the rain, which makes them wonder why he’s returned at all.  But they’re so used to his absence that they continue to ignore him even when he’s present, seeing him as little more than a stranger.  Their rebellion leads to a sort of LORD OF THE FLIES mentality, as if they don’t adhere to his rule, then they’re really turning their backs on all rules, which leaves them in a precarious position.  It appears to be no accident that the younger child actor is named after the child hero in Tarkovsky’s Ivan's Childhood (1962), with both facing their own individual perils, where the innocence of youth is cut short, while the older child is named after Tarkovsky’s second film ANDREI RUBLEV (1966).     

In the spirit of The Decalogue (Dekalog) (1988-89), with echoes of Abraham and Isaac (Impossible Ethics: A Response to the Sacrifice of Isaac ...), the tension between father and sons builds continually throughout the journey, introducing Oedipal themes, exuding a heightened sense of reality, augmented by a dirgelike soundtrack that only accentuates the emotional and psychic distance between them, where Vanya is the moody core of the story, refusing to play along, angry and irritated at being ordered around by a total stranger, spending much of the picture sulking alone, silently.  His father’s response is harsh and at times cruel, an enigmatic and tortuous Stalin figure, leaving Vanya on the side of the road and driving off for hours at a time, forcing him to endure endless hours of pelting rain in the cold.  His absence is never discussed, no questions about his past are ever asked, and little, if any emotion is ever exhibited by the father.  His behavior is bewildering, yet the children offer unbelievably authentic performances.  While Russia historically is a patriarchal society, despite being called the Motherland, Russian films, including those of Tarkovsky, often reflect absent fathers and nurturing mothers, while also using recurring symbols of water and rain, natural forces of eternity that may also reflect a cleansing of one’s sins.  There is a morality tale at play here, as the children are constantly questioning the authority of their father, which may as well be a question for the nation, having endured a long history of brutal dictators, a brief hint of democracy, but then a return back to the rule of despots with Putin.  Using heavy force and humiliation, the father attempts to teach his sons hard corps discipline, military style, fueling speculation that he may have been in the military, but also survival techniques out in the woods, taking them on a long and arduous journey driving an 80’s GAZ Volga Stationwagon before traveling by boat, eventually reaching a remote, completely uninhabited island.  While they have a burning curiosity about him, wondering where he has been, why he has come back, how he has been spending his time, viewing him as a terrifying figure that they have every intention to love, but there are continual interruptions en route, with their father making inexplicable phone calls, presumably to some mistress nearby, but we never really know.  The boys grow tired of being ordered around, becoming more and more defiant over time, with Vanya eventually learning to despise him, extremely suspicious of his motives, having little use for him, feeling more liberated without him.  The stunning cinematography is by Mikhail Krichman, who would go on to shoot all of the director’s films, whose slow panning offers a strong sense of foreboding, given extraordinary weight, meticulously establishing the mood, capturing the natural beauty in the landscape with long, unbroken silences, while often changing focus several times within the same shot, given the artistic complexity of a Tarkovsky film, where the final shot actually resembles the final shot of MIRROR (1975), as does an earlier shot of the mother smoking on the porch during the unexpected arrival of the absent father, with a strikingly original soundtrack adding considerable depth, setting an atmospheric tone.  Resembling Bergman films shot on Fårö Island, offering a rugged and distinctive landscape in a remote location, this film was mostly shot at Lake Ladoga, Europe’s largest freshwater lake, located in northwestern Russia between St. Petersburg and the Finnish border.

Winner of the Golden Lion award at the 2003 Venice Film Festival for both Best Film and Best First Film, exactly as Tarkovsky had won the Golden Lion for his own debut 41-years earlier, IVAN’S CHILDHOOD (1962), yet for Siberian-born Zvyagintsev, a former actor and TV director, this remains, arguably, the director’s most dramatically powerful and artistically accomplished film, and his most accessible, while also among his most exquisitely edited, though one ghastly tragedy happening shortly after the completion of the shooting resulted in the unfortunate death of Vladimir Garin who played the older brother Andrei, drowning in a lake not far from where the movie was shot.  In his acceptance speech, a visibly moved Zvyagintsev dedicated the Golden Lion to Garin.  The Cannes Film Festival of 2003 was similarly affected by the death of Emin Toprak, one of the lead actors in Ceylan’s DISTANT (Uzak) (2002), co-winner of the Best Actor Prize, who perished in a car accident shortly after that film was completed.  Part of the film’s emotional center is the struggle the boys have in attempting to develop a new relationship with their father, which seems on again and off again several times before they actually reach their destination, as just when he is about to send his two sons back on the bus to their mother, he inexplicably changes his mind, with Andrei identifying with his father, while Ivan feels cut off and exiled, as if he never existed.  While on the island the father goes off on individual hikes exploring the vicinity before asking his sons to join him, showing them an observational watchtower that overlooks the entire island (that Ivan refuses to climb), leaving the boys plenty of time on their own to squabble about his absence, wondering if he could have been in prison, or has a criminal background.  The father is on a quest to retrieve something buried on the island, digging a fairly deep pit to find it, yet viewers remain clueless what it is, as it ends up having no bearing on the real story, which is the developing family dynamic with its shifting moods, with the father trying to turn them into men, which he actually succeeds in doing, much to the surprise of the boys themselves, but circumstances dictate a hastened maturity, particularly in Andrei, assuming his father’s role (seen wearing his father’s watch), developing skills and instincts well beyond their years.  Most likely it’s the first time the boys have even been apart from their mother, leaving Ivan especially affected by her absence.  Like the Stalin era, there are hidden secrets that we never learn, especially about the father.  This absent father syndrome mirrors the loss of so many soldiers in World War II, with the Nazi Army coming within 20 miles of Moscow in what was a Red Army wipe out, a devastation of human losses, where throughout the war 22 to 26 million Russians died, or 15 – 20% of the entire population.  Historically, this was a moment of great trauma and suffering, and a psychological shock to the nation.  Perhaps this historical realism is at the root of the spiritual revelations of this film, recreating a similar shock, a deep psychological trauma, where perhaps the father’s absence is viewed as an act against nature, and it comes to represent a kind of allegorical elegy, and only through a spiritual transcendence or human epiphany can one appreciate and celebrate a renewed meaning of life.  There’s a photographic aftermath that celebrates their lives together, captured in monochrome snapshots from Andrei’s camera, like diary entries, with the boys playing around, mostly smiling, revealing a spontaneity that never previously existed, leaving viewers with a stark, dreamlike idealization.  For a film that offers few emotions throughout the journey, it certainly pays off with one of the more explosively emotional endings imaginable, as it is wordless, yet moves effortlessly and uncompromisingly to its natural conclusion, summing up the entire film in the last breathtakingly beautiful final twenty minutes.  The original music by Andrey Dergachev (aka Dergatchev) is hauntingly eerie and atmospheric, and at the end, solemn to the core, Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) OST - YouTube (5:07).    

Barbara

BARBARA                              B                     

Germany  (105 mi)  2012  d:  Christian Petzold             Official site [Germany]

No other movie about East Germany in the past 20 years (including the Oscar-winning “The Lives of Others”) has touched me, a former East German, as much as this one. It vividly brought back memories and emotions I had long forgotten. Everything is just so in this film, nothing exaggerated or glorified. In a convincing unhurried way, Mr Petzold has caught the spirit and atmosphere of the time. Each gesture, each tableau, from the hospital equipment and apartment furnishings to the smallest accessory, such as a folkloristic Bulgarian ashtray (something no East German household could be without) is rendered just right. Spiritually, too, the film airs the values that many East Germans feel have got lost in the more opulent, materialist world of a unified Germany. It is a fine homage to ordinary people living in extraordinary times.

—excerpt from The Economist, May 10, 2012,  New film: "Barbara": Ordinary people at extraordinary times 

Winner of the Silver Bear award for Best Director at Berlin 2012, Petzold has created perhaps his most conventional film, though initially resorting to the most uncompromising means, turning vaguely compromising only at the end, which feels somewhat disappointing.  Within this über repressive East German society on the edge of the Baltic Sea in 1980, the film stays completely under the surface for nearly the entire film, where feelings are a liability that can only get you into trouble, where everyone is under suspicion, often visited and scrutinized by the Stasi secret police, which means apartments searched and citizens subject to a thoroughly humiliating body cavity inspection, so the entire society exists as a kind of ghost world.  As seen through the eyes of a single character who is in nearly every frame of the film, Nina Hoss as the title character plays a disgraced citizen recently released from interrogation, where her crime was apparently requesting an exit visa, exiled to a small rural village where a somewhat dilapidated apartment has been assigned to her, also a job working as a physician at a local hospital, where everyone has been prepped by the Stasi for her arrival, particularly her boss André (Ronald Zehrfeld), the lead physician.  Barbara plays her role with such a subdued nature, her eyes downturned, never showing any sign of interest, completely guarded as if every living soul is spying on her.  Every neighbor and coworker has ulterior motives, as is every car parked outside, or every ring of the doorbell becomes a continuing sign of oppression, as it’s never a welcome visitor.  In terms of a character study, it’s reminiscent of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s Elena (2011), the subjugation of an older woman living in Moscow that feels equally suffocating, though in that film it’s all about the capitalist power of economics.  Still existing in the socialist era, neighbors spy on neighbors, where even your own lover could fall under suspicion, but there is no wealth whatsoever on display, instead children are sent to forced labor camps.

This is another minimalist film told with a certain rhythm and precision, with little information obtained through dialogue, as all normal channels of communication are blocked, buried beneath the surface, so instead it’s a film about body language, brief glances, furtive looks, inquisitive eyes, or stares, where Barbara is continually viewed as someone that has something to hide.  By following her routines even as no one is watching her, she does seem to have a secret life, riding her bike much of the time, often veering into the deep of the woods, obviously trying to avoid detection.  Often she is punished by the police simply for avoiding their watchful eyes when they cannot account for her actions.  While it feels like she is literally being run into the ground by incessant hounding, she never seems to have a moment of peace.  But in this society, that’s ordinary and what’s to be expected.  What’s unusual is for someone to care as much as Barbara does about the idea of freedom, where she’s already tasted it, lived it apparently, as she’s cultured and refined, one of the few doctors that actually listens to her patients, and away from the microscopic lens of the Stasi, she actually exhibits kindness to her patients, reading regularly to one of her young female adolescents, a story about riding down the Mississippi River on a raft from Huckleberry Finn, enjoying the air of being free, out from under the reach of an abusive father that cages and beats his own son.  The symbolism for freedom is not lost on the audience.  While the picture of life behind the Iron Curtain is one of mental captivity, where the State is always trying to capture and possess what’s in your mind, citizens find ways to elude the police, to tell them little or nothing, which is another way of not telling them anything at all.  While Barbara doesn’t exactly fit in, where all around her, everyone views her as a political subversive, André is continually supportive and helpful, attempting to make her life a little less miserable, which only makes her more suspicious of his motives.  

Petzold exudes formal restraint, exercising a Kieslowski Eastern European style cinema of moral anxiety, never allowing emotions to rise to the surface, showing a bleak world where life isn’t lived so much as barely tolerated, where nobody likes living under a police state, but most get used to the inevitability that people close to them are informers, as the Stasi claimed nearly a quarter of a million informers, most all of them ordinary citizens.  When Barbara ventures outdoors on her bike, it’s a sunless world draped in layers of grey, where the wind is always howling and it feels like storms are continually approaching.  Nature itself feels untamed and hostile as humans attempt to navigate their way through the dark.  Few clues are offered here, as it’s a barebones story with little to go on, where much of it is following the doctors as they make their rounds through the hospital, yet throughout, one feels like Barbara is resisting this everpresent weight on her back simply by not joining in, by adamantly refusing to go along with this repressive regime.  In a moment when she lets her guard down, she admits, “It's impossible to be happy here.”  Unlike THE LIVES OF OTHERS (2006), winner of the Best Foreign Language Film that told a similar story from the point of view of a conflicted Stasi officer, this reveals the everyday rhythms of the same subjugated society through the life of an ordinary citizen.  While the film gets many of the details right and dramatically reflects a downbeat and subservient society, it doesn’t expose the behind-the-scenes operations of the Stasi that THE LIVES OF OTHERS reveals or the profoundly effective interrogation techniques used to browbeat information out of people.  Instead BARBARA creates an atmospheric recreation of a toxic cloud hanging over East Germany, a time when people were choking on the fumes of a failed political regime that resorted to terrorizing their own citizens.  The more restricted people are from obtaining freedom, the more significant it ultimately becomes in their lives.  While Barbara seems frenetically driven to escape rather than remain a rat in a cage, some may find her end game baffling, as her outlook changes from dire, life and death circumstances where she’s literally gasping on her last breath from each insufferable moment to something else altogether, something unique in the human spirit. 

Elena

ELENA            B                    

Russia  (109 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Andrei Zvyagintsev

Somewhat slight compared to his earlier efforts, THE RETURN (2003) and THE BANISHMENT (2007), this is a subtle film that delves into the heart of the Russian conscience, where a wordless ten–minute opening into the empty expanse of a meticulously clean, thoroughly modern and luxurious yet seemingly cold and sterile Moscow condominium sets the scene for an unsparing examination of class consciousness.  Something of a generational morality tale where the future looks hopeless and overly bleak, this is a slow moving character exposé, almost a theater piece, where what’s most significant is the developing interior worlds of the characters, given a very novelesque structure of what turns out to be a modern day variation on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  Centered around two main characters, a retired couple, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) and Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) live in separate bedrooms, each with their own television sets, where every morning she opens the curtains and wakes him up, where her role is carefully defined around the subordinate position of serving him, like a nursemaid, where it’s a portrait of two entirely separate worlds.  Extending further is the world of their children, each through previous marriages, where Vladimir’s mostly unseen and distant daughter, Katerina (Elena Lyadova), seems to live a hedonistic and carefree existence, accustomed to being taken care of all her life by the support of her father, while Elena’s aloof teenage son lives in a state of abject poverty with his perpetually idle father and nagging mother in a tenement housing project sitting adjacent to 3 nuclear power smokestacks.  The dismal picture of their blighted lives says it all, where Elena is constantly hounded for money, but Vladimir is unyielding when it comes to offering help, wondering why he should support a family whose own father won’t get off his unemployed ass and get a job to help support his own family?  When Elena tries to compare her son’s situation with his daughter, Vladimir refuses to hear any more on the subject, claiming even though his sarcastically hostile daughter is no great prize, he’s at least fulfilling his fatherly obligation.  What to do about their future is the subject of the film’s moral center, told through alternating characters, one living under the protection of supreme comfort, while the other can be seen traipsing through the graffiti-laden slums to visit her son and grandson. 

Having met late in life, their lives were already structured, as Elena was the nurse in the hospital several years ago when they met, and has continued serving that same role in marriage.  Something of a control freak, Vladimir is particular about having things exactly his way, where there isn’t an ounce of recognition or awareness of how he’s treating his wife, while she dutifully submits to each and every one of his commands, never expressing any sign of resentment.  Under the surface, however, she is boiling at her husband’s refusal to take her family seriously.  For all practical purposes, this is the set up, with no other background information provided other than the acute visual detail captured by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who worked on the director’s earlier films as well, and the splendid intermittent use of the 3rd Movement of Phillip Glass’s Symphony #3, a tense and pulsating use of throbbing strings that effectively becomes the voice of the subconscious.  Vladimir’s sense of control can be see in this wordless car driving sequence that expresses a rather sophisticated sense of choice, Elena (2011) - Car driving scene - YouTube (2:46), where the haunting Glass music comes in at the end.  Shortly afterwards, he suffers a heart attack at the gym, literally forcing him to confront his mortality.  One of the best scenes in the film is the hospital visit by his daughter, the simply brilliant Elena Lyadova, who is haughty and cynical, just like her father, but surprisingly eloquent, Elena 2011 - YouTube  (5:16), where the cameraman can’t take his gaze off her fascinating performance.  This visit seems to solidify his view that he needs to write a will, informing Elena that she will receive a generous monthly stipend, but his daughter will inherit everything else.  This sends Elena into a state of flux, her hopes for her son dashed, as she sees Katerina as a spoiled and ungrateful child, someone who couldn’t be less appreciative of her father, only using him for money.  With few spoken words between the two of them, Elena has to wordlessly convey the plaguing guilt of the young Raskolnikov, as she wonders if righting a wrong by committing an unthinkable mortal sin is permissible if it’s in pursuit of a higher purpose, where her transformation is chilling.   

Like the novel, the film barely touches upon the crime, but lingers instead on the unintended interior consequences of the punishment, where Elena skillfully covers up the tracks of her foul deed, where earlier in the film Katrina understood her well, claiming she played the part well of a mournful and grieving wife, where in the hospital her words to her father haunt the final moments of the film, like a Macbethian witch’s prophecy: “It’s irresponsible to produce offspring that you know are going to be sick and doomed, since the parents are just as sick and doomed.”  If Zvyaguintsev films produce anything, they brilliantly foreshadow a bleak future, where Elena struggles with a Mephistophelian choice to prevent a gloomy future for her grandson Sasha, where his parents are elated when she suddenly has available cash to bribe his way into college, rescuing her grandson from the inevitable fate of being forced to join the army, seen as a fate worse than prison.  He barely acknowledges her actions however, much like Elena feared Katerina would react, when the director then shows us the real face of the Russian future.  As the electricity goes out in the tenement housing projects turning the apartment dark, Sasha goes outside and joins a gang of others waiting for him that get liquored up, and in an exquisite example of the best uses of a hand-held camera, follow the group as they hastily approach a clearing in front of the nuclear power smokestacks with the precision of a military strike, where in a riveting sequence they attack a group of outsiders huddling next to a fire, savagely kicking and beating them all to within an inch of their lives, a senseless act of ultraviolence that’s right out of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), a stormtrooping, boot-kicking, neo-Nazi vision of disillusioned youth that’s becoming all too common an occurrence these days, almost always alcohol fueled.  Like the wordless emptiness of the opening sequence, the final sequence is eerily similar, with the tenement dwellers now inhabiting the luxurious condo, bringing with them their learned habits of drunken idleness and shirking responsibility, soulless creatures who are literally pretenders to the human race.