The opening credits of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s The Return shows a view of the water and a submerged boat. Two Russian brothers and friends
are testing their manhood jumping off a tower into the water. Ivan or Vanya, the youngest (Ivan Dobronravov) refuses to
jump even when told he will be called a pig if he doesn’t. His mother has to
come and get him down. She tells him when he’s ready, he will jump.
The boys
fight at school and when they return home, their father, whom they haven’t seen
for 12 years is asleep at home. They look in at him and he is posed exactly
like the Mantegna Christ, shown at right. He proposes taking the two boys on a trip with him. Originally planned for two
days, the film goes through an entire week.
The boys keep asking where their father came from. The answer they get is, “He just came.” The boys only know the father from
one picture they have of the boys with their parents.
As the boys and their
father travel further and further into the Russian wilderness, the sense of
foreboding get stronger and stronger, especially since Ivan and his father constantly
are at fighting, often physically. Ivan in open defiance at one point declares to his brother, “If he touches me once more, I’ll kill
him.”
They drive to a distant lake and then take a boat to a
deserted island where the father has unexplained business.
Rather than do spoilers, I will leave the film there.
Visually the film is stunning. Each image is carefully
composed and framed. In one scene, for example, the car goes down a winding
road. The camera moves slightly to the left so keep the car image exactly in
the center of the frame, and we watch the car in real time drive out of the shot.
How should one interpret the film? The film poses lots of
questions and very few real answers. Among the simplest is why is each day of
the week prominently displayed? Is the father intended as a Christ figure? Are
we watching Easter week? The father says he ate a lot of fish during the 12
years he was gone. Why? How violent can their relationships get?
According IMDB website, Andrey Zvyagintsev says the main
characters of the film represent the four elements: “Earth is Mother, water is
Father … the elder brother, Andrei, is air and Ivan is fire. But if you think
it’s all different, it is.”
Zvyagintsez is a master at building and maintaining tension. The underlying threat of storms mirrors the three actors relationships. The two sons and the father (Konstantin Lavronenko) are incredibly riveting actors in the
film. I was shocked to learn that Vladimir Garin (Andrei), the older of the two
boys, drowned after the filming was completed in a late not far from where the
film was done. It is a real loss.
The film can be streamed at Netflix.
The Return (2003) *****
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