Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev , 2003, Russia, 105 mins, subtitles
Cast:
Vladimir Garin, Ivan Dobronravov, Konstantin Lavronenko, Natalya Vdovina
Centering on the return of a mysterious father figure into the lives of two young boys, Andrei Zvyagintsev's feature debut Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) is a beautifully shot, well-performed, would-be gem - if only it weren't so darn frustrating.
Ivan (Dobronravov) and Andrey (Garin) are two typical young boys. The opening scene finds them standing on a small platform with their friends, who dare each other to jump off it into the forbidding sea below. Their characters are marked from the beginning: Ivan, the younger brother, can't bring himself to make the jump, and stubbornly remains on the platform in his pants while all the others declare him a chicken and go home. It takes his mother to rescue him, arriving to find him shivering on the platform long after his friends have gone, wrapping him in her arms and promising that she'll never call him a coward. Andrey, older, taller and without the sullen insight of his brother, goes with the flow and the majority.
That's roughly how events develop when they arrive home one day (having fought and then chased each other all the way in order to be the first to present their grievances to their mother) only to find a stranger asleep in her bed. It's their father, played with a volatile excellence by Lavronenko, whom they know only from a picture taken when they were barely more than toddlers, yet within a matter of hours they're off on a two-day fishing trip with him. Ivan sits in the back of the car, pouting and intense, while Andrei sits at the front, eager to please but a bit dreamy. Their characters are on a collision course with their father's moody and mercurial temperament and his mysterious agenda, so when they agree to accompany him on the 'business' that cuts short their fishing trip we know something's going to happen. In fulfilling that expectation, however, the film simultaneously leaves several questions distinctly unanswered.
Why has he returned? What are his motives in returning now? His wife seems neither happy nor especially perturbed about the prospect of her children going away with him, despite the unmistakable aroma of violence that lingers about him. The dinner on the night of his return is tense and charged with questions. Where has he been? What is his 'business' that changes the course of their trip? The adventure that unfolds - a road trip through rain and mud, a row across water when the engine fails, camping on a deserted island - is a tense, intense one, filled with fascinating character studies and narrative twists, nearly all of which centre around the figure of the Father, and most of which prove to be red herrings.
Once the boys reach the island with their father, the clues increase. The father steals away and for once the camera follows him as he digs up a box from the floor of an abandoned hut and stows it on their boat before his sons can see. This box potentially contains the answers to all our questions regarding his shady appearance. In the meantime, more questions arise: what exactly is he trying to teach his two sons through his rough handling and the constant challenges that he sets them? To be strong, to be men, to be more like him? We're with the boys themselves on this one as they try to piece the sudden entrance of their father into their lives through the scanty clues offered. Ivan is suspicious, and his rebellions are met with harsh punishments such as a day in the rain, abandoned. But arguably it's Andrey that the father is harshest towards, meeting his preoccupied nature with a violent response. A disobeyed order ultimately sparks the final, brutal exchange between father and sons, and effectively puts the seal on our disappointment.
It seems the film is asking us to look deeper than immediate narrative gratification - as if the contents of the box don't matter so much as the development of Andrey's character, say, from meek follower to adept leader. In using such an obvious and classic convention as the unopened box however, Zvyagintsev must be aware of its connotations. Perhaps in his flouting of the rule of Chekhov's gun - the playwright's assertion that if a gun is loaded in the first act it must be fired before the end of the play - he is pointedly leaving us as bemused and unsatisfied as (though far less grieved than) the two boys. He calls the film "an intent mythological look on human life" - a comment as obscure as the ending.
Winner of the Golden Lion at Venice last year, Vozvrashcheniye promises to be a "spellbinding and tense" film, but just as in fairy tales, when characters awake from spells blinking and confused at what has passed, so the overriding feeling as the credits roll is a total blank about what happened in the past two hours.
Kerry McLeod
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