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Andrej Zvjagintsev (Russia, 1964) debuted with
Vozvrashcheniye/ The Return (2003), a cryptic, minimalist
thriller and domestic drama, which began his collaboration with cinematographer
Mikhail Krichman.
Children climb a tower by a lake and challenge each other at diving from
the top. The youngest,
Vanya, can't jump and can't climb down either. Terrified, he spend hours
freezing half-naked on the tower. His mom come to rescue him.
The other kids call him a coward. When his own older brother Andrei does so,
Vanya attacks him. They fight all the way home and they are surprised to find
that their father is there, asleep.
They have to look at old photos to believe that the man is really their father
because they grew up without him for twelve years.
When the father wakes up, he coldly sits at the table and eats as if nothing special
was going on. The children are excited. The father promises to take them on
a fishing trip.
Along the way he never smiles at them nor does it provide explanations for
what he does. When the children are
attacked by two thugs, the father continues indifferent his phone call.
Then he gets in the car and chases one of the thieves, takes him back and
asks Andrei to beat him up, but Andrei doesn't want to.
The father lets the thug go and even gives him some money.
Then he puts the kids on a bus back home, claiming that he has some important
business to tend to. The kids are waiting disappointed in the bus when he comes
back and tells them that they can spend three days together before he heads
off for this mysterious business. The kids are hesitant because their mother
expects them back in one day, not three, but then they accept.
They watch as their father carries out a mysterious transaction with another
man. They camp by the lake. At night Vanya tells Andrei that he is scared of
their father and wants to go home.
When the father suddenly decides to move camp, Vanya complains that he had
just started fishing, and his father unceremoniously dumps him in the middle of
nowhere.
The father only returns when it starts raining. Vanya's clothes are completely
soaked in rain. Vanya is angry and yells at his father.
When the car gets stuck in mud, the father and the children have to work
together under heavy rain to push it.
Vanya, tired of adventure, still wants to go home, but
Andrei is getting excited that he is being treated like an adult.
They stop at a ghost town on the way to an island, and
prepare a boat to sail. When they reach the remote island,
Vanya, still hostile and suspicious, steals his father's knife.
The father takes them to an observation tower. Vanya, still scared of heights,
doesn't climb it. Andrei, instead, follows his father everywhere.
Vanya keeps antagonizing his father.
Given the boat for an hour, the kids find an abandoned ship, get a fish,
and return several hours later. The father loses his temper and slaps Andrei
repeatedly. To defend his brother, Vanya pulls out the knife and threatens his
father but then runs away in the forest. The father runs after him but Vanya
manages to reach the watchtower and climbs it to the top, threatening to jump.
His father tries to prevent this and accidentally falls to his death.
The children build a raft to carry the body across the forest, and then pull
the body to the boat, an operation that takes the whole night.
Then they row back to the car.
When they reach the car, they are so exhausted that they let the boat drift away
and watch it sink in the lake, with their father's body.
They drive back home empty handed.
We are not told what their father's intentions were, where he had been and
where he was going next.
Izgnanie/ The Banishment (2007) is
a loose adaptation of
William Saroyan's
"The Laughing Matter" (1953).
Elena (2011) is
a cold rational version of Hollywood's film noir recast in a world in
which crime does pay.
Unlike the poor granma, who is happy to be a housewife and to serve and obey her
husband, the rich spoiled daughter has broken all the rules of what a good woman is
supposed to do, and is about to be rewarded. The good housewife has no choice
but to take justice into her hands.
By the end it does feel like survival of the fittest: everybody is selfish
and the old ones only care for her/his own genes.
Long shots explore a luxury apartment.
The aging
Elena is remarried to the wealthy and equally old Vladimir. They both have trouble
with their children from previous marriages. Her son Sergej has a family,
but he is chronically unemployed and needs money to send his teenage son
Sasha to college. Elena begs Vladimir to pay the money. Vladimir is reluctant
because Sergei still owes him money, and would rather see Sasha join the army.
Vladimir's daughter Katya, on the other hand, enjoys the nice life.
One day Vladimir has a heart attack. He jokes that he met Elena when she was
a nurse and he was a patient with peritonitis. Elena calls Katya and has
a private chat with her. Katya is arrogant and offensive. She does not
hesitate to admit that she cares zero about her father. Then she confronts
her father at the hospital,
boasts about her hedonistic lifestyle, paid by her father, and
holds against him that he mostly cared for his money not for his family.
She gives him some of her materialistic philosophy, and he is amused.
She even admits that she's there only for the money that he gives her.
Elena, meanwhile, is lighting a candle in a church, asking the saint to
restore Vladimir to good health, and then she visits her son's family again,
playing with the second grandson, a little baby.
Released from the hospital, Vladimir tells Elena that he has decided to write
a will: he bequeaths everything to his daughter and leaves Elena with a
monthly stipend. Furthermore, he has decided not to help Sasha.
Elena pretends to behave like the devout housewife she has always been but
instead prepares a deadly cocktail of drugs.
After he dies, she carefully removes any evidence of the crime, and then
makes it look like he died while having sex.
At the funeral Katya looks sincerely sorry, while Elena cries crocodile tears.
The attorney splits the estate equally between daughter and wife.
Elena has already taken all the money from the safe and later takes it to
his son. Sergey's family celebrates that Sasha will be able to go to college.
Sergey has a surprise for Elena too: his wife is pregnant for the third time.
The light goes off and Elena almost faints.
Sasha goes out drinking with his buddies, who behave like arrogant thugs.
They attack other kids and Sasha is beaten. The whole family moves into
Vladimir's apartment.
Leviathan (2014) is a bleak melodrama of
Kafka-esque alienation imbued with Chekhov's pathos
and ironically set in an elegiac landscape.
In a provincial town far from the capital,
two men leave from a hotel room.
Stopped by a police officer and family friend, Pasha, who needs the
usual favor, they laugh at the idea that there could be such a thing as an
honest cop. One of them is Kolya, owner of a local house and business.
At home his child Roma is child eagerly for his retun and insulting his
step-mother Lilya.
friend comes looking for Kolya while Kolya taking Roma to school
fixing truck he can't because court hearing Ivan
The other adult is Kolya's old friend from the army, Dmitri, now an attorney
in the capital. He has come to help Kolya with a difficult case: the town's
mayor has decided to take his place and has forged papers and bribes courts.
The attorney advises Kolya that the only way to win is to blackmail the
mayor with compromising information: the mayor, Vadim, seems to have committed
all sorts of crimes. As expected, the court judges in favor of Vadim.
This corrupt mayor, Vadim, dines with the head of the local church, who
reminds him of God's power but basically accepts Vadim's crimes.
Kolya at home is drunk and furious: his whole life "is" the place that Vadim
has obtained illegally.
At night Vadim comes, also drunk, demanding that they move out immediately.
Dmitri, calm and confident, asks for a person-to-person meeting at his office.
Dmitri is up all night working on the legal merit of their case, and the
following day tries to file a complaint, except that neither the police nor
the court accepts it. They even refuse to issue a certificate of refusal.
Kolya loses his temper and is jailed.
Menawhile, Lilya is asking their family friends, Pasha and his wife,
to get Kolya released.
Then Lilya inspects the place that they will have to move into once they
are evicted from their home, and gets really depressed seeing how ugly
and run-down it is.
Dmitri visits Vadim in his office and blackmails him: he has compiled a file
that reveals how Vadim builds up his power. Vadim tells him that he can't
let go of the house but they agree on a large sum as compensation.
Dmitri and Lilya are actually lovers and they sleep together while Kolya is
being released from jail.
Vadim is truly scared, and tells his three closest associates
(two women and one man) that if he goes down they will go down with him.
He unleashes them after the young city attorney.
Kolya and Dmitri attend a picnic to celebrate the truck driver's birthday with
Pasha the cop. They all drive to a remote lake and play with guns
(the targets are portraits of former Soviet leaders, from Lenin to Gorbachev).
Suddenly Pasha's children tell the others that Dmitri is "suffocating" Lilya
and the adults understand what is going on behind Kolya's back.
We don't see the fight but we see Lilya and Dmitri driving back in a car,
with bruises on their faces. At the hotel Lilya asks Dmitri whether he
believes in God, the same question that the corrupt mayor asks him, and
he answers annoyed that he only believes in facts.
Pasha and his wife are keeping Kolya company. They are all drunk.
When they hear Lilya's car, the wife sends Pasha away (he is drunk but
claims to be able to drive because he is a traffic cop).
Instead of apologizing Lilya asks Kolya whether he wants a child.
The following morning she is back to her job, cleaning fish in a nearby village
that she reaches by bus.
Meanwhile, the mayor kidnaps Dmitri the lawyer and shows him how much he cares
about his blackmail. He and his thugs take him to a remote place and fake
an execution, and then just dump him there. Dmitri gets the message and
leaves town.
When she gets home from work, Kolya wants her madly and they make love in
the basement. Roma sees them and runs away disgusted, stopping in front of
the skeleton of a whale to cry alone. Back home he screams like a maniac
against his mother and his father can't calm him down. Kolya has forgiven
her, but Roma hasn't. She gets up at night, walks to the sea and jumps to
her death. When the body is found several days later, Kolya drinks vodka
asks God why this is happening to him. At the grocery store Kolya runs into
the priest, Vasily, unaware that the priest is in cahoots with the mayor.
Kolya scorns his God, but the priest replies with the story of Job, who
resigned himself to his fate.
Pasha thinks that Kolya is capable of having killed his wife.
The police arrest Kolya for the murder of his wife. They tell him that
Pasha and his wife Angela have testified that he threatened to kill his wife
and her lover. They tell him that Lilya was raped and murdered, and that they
found the weapon (a hammer) in his house. The police advise him to sign
a confession that would reduce his sentence. Instead he makes the mistake
of insisting on his innocence.
When he is taken to jail, he begs the escorting officer to take care of his
son. The officer sarcastically replies that the state will take care of his son
(the same state that has stolen his property and is imprisoning him for a
crime he didn't commit).
Pasha and Angela visit Roma and tell him that, with no guardians, he'll end up
in the orphanage, and they offer to adopt him.
Kolya's house, that he inherited from his folks, is readily destroyed to
make room for Vadim's lucrative development and a new church.
Vadim receives the phone call that Kolya has been sentenced to jail while
he is dining alone in a fancy restaurant.
His friend the priest delivers a sermon in church
that sounds like a warning to resist the temptation of those who spread "lies".
Vadim is sitting among the audience. When mass is over, he walks out chatting
about the new church and we realize that it was built on Kolya's house.
Nelyubov/ Loveless (2017) is a "je accuse" of the new Russian
bourgeoisie, emerged from communism to be extremely selfish and materialistic.
The parents of the child only care about their own future, and the child is
an obstacle to their happiness, besides being de facto the cause of their
current unhappiness. They never truly recognized him as a living person,
and perhaps they didn't want to recognize him even dead, refusing to take
responsibility for both his melancholy life and his horrible death.
(Not sure that the point is of showing the lengthy scene of the man having sex with a pregnant girlfriend).
Still photos of winter scenery in a wooded area.
A boy leaves school and walks home through that area, but it is fall, not winter.
From the window of his room he can see the buildings of the city in the distance.
His mother tells him to tidy up the room because people are coming to see the
apartment. She is selling it because she is divorcing the child's father.
His mother tells the visitors that he is 12-year-old. He gets upset and leaves
the room. In the evening his parents discuss the boy's future: neither wants
him. The mother, Zhenya, thinks it should be the father's responsibility,
because it's him, Boris, who cheated on her, but the father tries to convince
her that the child needs his mother more. Meanwhile, the boy is hearing everything from his room and crying.
Boris is also afraid of the reaction of his employer Beardy, a fanatical Christian, who not approve if they send the child to an orphanage.
The following morning the boy,
Alyosha ,
rushes to school and Boris drives to work
listening to the radio that talks about the Maya prophecy that the world will
end that winter (hence it must be 2012). During the lunch break he discusses
with a colleague, Sergey, the firm's policy that bans divorces: if he divorces, he
better get married again right away so at the next corporate party nobody
will notice that he shows up with no wife.
Zhenya takes the train to see her hair stylist. They chat about her new man,
Anton, a middle-aged wealthy man with a daughter who is studying abroad.
Her hairdresser complains that her daughter is 19 and doesn't want to work,
and her husband is a drunk.
Boris goes shopping in a supermarket with his new girlfriend Masha, who is pregnant with his child and lives with her mother.
Her mother is visiting a relative and they have the apartment all to themselves,
so they can have sex. Then Masha starts crying because she's scared that he
will leave her like he's leaving Zhenya.
Meanwhile, Anton picks up Zhenya and drives her to a fancy restaurant.
Then they have sex in his apartment. She confesses to him that she never
wanted the child, that she almost died giving birth to him, that she
was repulsed by him, that she still blames the child for her misery.
She always hated Alyosha.
She then takes a taxi to go home and goes to sleep happy.
The following morning Zhenya is informed by Alyosha's teacher that
Alyosha has not been at the school for two days.
She calls Boris but Boris is in line for lunch at the cafeteria and doesn't
want to deal with it and tells her that she is overreacting.
She calls the police. The police officer files the report after inspecting
the boy's room and determining that the parents didn't kill him, but
he tells her that the bureaucratic rules are to wait for the child to
return home because in most cases they do. The cop advises her to call
a volunteer group instead of the police. The volunteers come and starts
investigating. There is only one relative who could have taken Alyosha in:
Zhenya's mother, and her phone is off. The coordinator in charge, Ivan, asks
them to visit granma and make sure the child is not hiding there, and sends
another volunteer, Lena, to follow her.
It's a long drive and it's getting dark.
Boris and Zhenya yell at each other all the way.
She insists on smoking, he rolls down her window and plays loud music.
They reach the destination in the middle of the night. Lena searches the
premises while Zhenya tells her mother that Alyosha is missing.
Hearing of the divorce, her mom calls her a "whore", and swears that she will
not bequeath anything to her when she dies.
Her mom is afraid that they want to dump the child with her.
On the way back, as the sun is coming up, Zhenya regrets not having listened
to her mother when she got pregnant: her mother wanted her to get an abortion
and ditch Boris, but instead she listened to Boris' sweet talk.
She confesses that she never loved him, she just wanted to leave her mom.
She curses the day she got pregnant, and she feels sorry for Masha, Boris'
new victim.
Boris stops the car in the middle of nowhere and kicks her out.
Now the volunteers begin searching the woods.
The police collect all the available videos from buildings, but the child
doesn't show up in any of them. The police now contemplates the possibility
of a kidnapping.
Ivan asks Zhenya to call all the hospitals.
Meanwhile, he interviews Alyosha's only friend, who leads them to a
secret hideout, an abandoned ruined building.
Inside Boris, who has joined the search, finds Alyosha's jacket.
The volunteers search the ruined building, while outside it starts snowing,
but find no trace of Alyosha.
Then they start searching the forest as the snow stopped.
Meanwhile, Lena accompanies Zhenya Anton Boris to a hospital where a child matching the description has just been admitted, but he's not Alyosha.
The volunteers abandon the search when it starts snowing again, and they start
searching buildings and posting flyers around the neighborhood.
Ivan accompanies Zhenya and Boris to the morgue to examine the disfigured
corpse of a child who matches the description. It is not Alyosha, but first Zhenya and then Boris have a nervous breakdown. Ivan suggests that they do a DNA test to make sure it is not their child, but they refuse.
Years go by.
It is now winter and the streets are blanketed with snow.
Children play in the snow.
The apartment is being remodeled by the new owners.
Boris is watching his new son while watching the news about the
Ukrainian civil war. Masha is talking with her mother who wants them to move
out because the apartment is too small for four people.
Meanwhile, Anton in his luxury house is watching the same news, while
Zhenya is exercising.
The film ends with the same
wooded area of the beginning, where Alyosha used to walk coming back from school.
There are still posters of missing person Alyosha.
Mikhail Krichman's camera work is a strong element of these films.
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