September 6, 2012

Day 54/57 - The Return (2003)



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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