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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
2004
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THE
RETURN Fathers and Sons – To Sire with Love – Begetting a New Russian Cinema by Harlan Kennedy When the 2003
Venice Film Festival honoured Russia’s THE RETURN with the Golden Lion for Best Film, was it honouring the return of
Russia itself? To the cinematic
fold? To the high ground of movie
artistry? There we were in
the Sala Grande. Two hours of gnomic drama, mesmerising landscape and
haunting emotion about two boys trying to bond with a cold, mysterious, seemingly
tyrannical twelve-years-absent father. When cast and director were presented
to the audience, that audience rose like a sea – or more aptly with this
film, a vast and cloud-hung lake – whipped into the wave motion of applause
by the winds of a passionate witnessing. We thought we had
seen a great film. We had. The most minimal
storyline in modern memory – the two brothers, the dad who comes back one
unexplained day to bear them off on a week-long fishing trip, the lost filial
love that struggles to return only to be beaten back by wariness, hurt and
distance – climaxes in a series of lakeside scenes so majestically cryptic
that what you ‘read’ is what you get. And by the time we reach these scenes,
we seem to know intuitively the heartbeat inside every abstraction, the
meaning inside every mystery. Like most triumphs,
this one came with a sacrifice. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev was there in
Venice. So were two of the three main actors. But Vladimir Garin, who played
the older brother, had died in a drowning accident eerily echoing the events
of the movie. But there are so
many echoes in and around this film. Some we were ready for. What Russian
director can avoid evoking Tarkovsky? Since Tarkovsky remapped Russia with
his vision and artistic personality, how do you show the country without
quoting or conjuring the work of its great artistic cartographer? Then again, why is
Russia today making so many movies about fathers and sons? Sokurov’s powerful FATHER AND SON.
Khlebnikov and Popogrebsky’s acclaimed ROAD TO KOKTEBEL, which like THE
RETURN is a journey movie about a father trying to win back his son’s trust.
We know this theme’s pedigree in Russian culture and literature, from Gorki
to Turgenev. But perhaps its re-emergence in modern Russian cinema is telling
us something – about the struggle of an orphaned land, the ex-USSR, to find,
to test, to trust, or strive to trust, new parents. THE RETURN is the
highest triumph to date of a new cinema that sent its old parent packing in
the early 1990s. The return of democracy, combined with Boris Yeltsin’s
economic reforms, killed off the state-controlled industry. A fatherless film
culture struggled to survive for ten years. Then money followed success –
state money mostly, but now without Soviet strings – as a new generation of
filmmakers hit the international festival circuit, winning prizes and
praises. In 2000 there was
$15m for 40-odd features. In 2002, $34m for 66 features. This year $50m has
been earmarked for an even larger output. Meanwhile the country’s total
box-office earnings rose from $112m to $190m between 2002 and 2003. THE RETURN was
filmed over two years at a cost of $400,000. Its success around the world
persuaded Goskino, the Moscow-based state film body, to spend 25 percent of
its budget exclusively on new directors. New directors may also get new
creative freedoms, after the results provided by 38-year-old Zvyagintsev. The
actor turned first-time feature director got away with behaviour worthy of
David Lean. A patient producer, Dmitri Lesnevsky, who in an exception from
Russia’s government-funding tendency committed his own roubles to the
project, allowed Zvyagintsev to ignore all deadlines and budget limitations,
actual or theoretical. Wait for the right
lowering sky? By all means. Find the perfect marathon rainstorm in which to
drench your actors for days on end? Of course. “I felt like it was going to
be a cinematic revelation,” Lesnevsky said. “So I never pushed him. I
accepted all the expenses.” That must be why
THE RETURN, a story which for minutes on end seems to have no direction at
all (in the narrative-compass not creative-control sense) has such a final,
overpowering sense of purpose and even inevitability. Leave a work to grow at
its own pace – a barely-known luxury for cinematic art outside of Lean,
Kubrick or Cimino – and it will become organic, however massive or
amorphous-seeming. I keep remembering
that aftermath at that Venice showing. How the clouds over the lake seemed to
steal off the screen and hover, grey and large with tender menace, over the
audience. How the movie’s heroic reticence wrapped us in a pall of wonder –
had the characters really said so
little (indeed almost nothing) to illuminate who they were and what had been
their past lives? Yet how the fear with
which love is instinct, the love of son for father or father for son,
passionately communicated, had raised hairs on the back of our necks, which
we were still trying to smooth down as we stood to applaud. Has the heyday of early Soviet cinema finally sired a son? A son different but worthy: one washed in the struggle, pain and emptiness of intervening time-landscapes but, just like the sons in THE RETURN, surviving to find a shore where a father’s affirming shade consoles for a father’s irrevocable death. COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. WITH THANKS TO THE AMERICAN FILM INSTITUTE FOR THEIR CONTINUING
INTEREST IN WORLD CINEMA. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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