2. Andrei Zvyagenitsev's "Vozvrashcheniye" (The Return): A brilliant Russian film made in 2003

Russia, (or rather, in the purist sense, the erstwhile USSR), has produced some of the finest filmmakers of the 20th century--Andrei Tarkovsky, Sergei Eisenstein, Grigory Kozintsev, and Sergei Paradjanov. Hollywood (with the exception of Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick and Terrence Malick) is arguably dwarfed in the company of these giants. Andrei Zvyagintsev follows in the footsteps of those Russian giants. The opening shots of The Return remind you of Tarkovsky and the bleak, barren landscapes of Kozintsev's later works. The original screenplay was written by Vladimir Moiseenko and Aleksandr Novototskiy-Vlassov.

At the most obvious level, the film can be interpreted as a chronicle of two children recording (with a help of a diary written by the siblings) the events of a week with their father that facilitate their transformation from childhood to manhood in a broad metaphorical sense.

The father with the younger son in the car
heading towards the lake

The two sons

At a more complex level, the film can also be interpreted as a political film--with the father figure representing the strong Communist USSR and the death of that political consortium. The two sons could be interpreted as one representing the section that accepted subjugation by the state and the other that rebelled against the state and demanded freedom and democracy. Today, both kinds of former-USSR citizens yearn for the "FATHERland" of the past for varied reasons.

At yet another level, as some critics have noted, the film provides the option of being interpreted in religious terms. Is the father figure any different from Christ coming to the world to help the world, and die in the process to be accepted by those who believe and don't believe? The film is peppered with clues that afford that interpretation: the fish symbol, the storm in the sea, the walking on water (by the boys on a stone below the water line), the week ends on Sunday (the day of Resurrection), the late return by the boys and the rebukes that follow (Jesus admonishing disciples for falling asleep), acceptance through death, the first sight of the father lying asleep resembling a crucified and dead Jesus, the last supper (at home), the baptism by rain, etc. Is Andrei (the elder boy) named after Apostle Andrew? Are the leaves under the car recalling the palm leaves for Jesus' entry into Jerusalem... the list could go on. One reason is that most Russians are deeply religious individuals belonging to the Russian Orthodox Church. At the same time one could equally argue that all these were mere coincidences and there is no intentional Biblical reference in the film.

The brilliance of The Return and the films of the other four Russian directors are outstanding because they too could be entertaining at different levels and thus appeal to you 50 to 80 years after they were made. Like Tarkovsky used Bach's Requiem in Solyaris, Zvyagintsev also uses Mozart's Requiem in The Return. The Requiems afford to highlight somber spirit of the respective tales and add a splash of divinity. The sudden rains, the sound of trains are not new--Tarkovsky used these effects in Stalker. The Return seems to often hark back to Tarkovsky's and Kozintsev's Christian Marxian imagery.

The film is in color--yet the colors are muted with only the red car standing out. Kozintsev declined to film Hamlet and King Lear in color; Tarkovsky also used muted colors and used sepia tints often.

The most jarring fact for any viewer is that the young actor who played the elder brother died in the very lake shown in the film, months after the film was made.

The stark, spartan, evocative film deserved the Golden Lion award for the best film at the 2003 Venice film festival. By a coincidence, precisely 40 years ago Venice had honored Kozintsev's Hamlet! The brilliance of The Return is all pervasive--acting, direction, photography, editing, screenplay and yet the film falls short of the allure of a Tarkovsky or the later works of Kozintsev. (Eight years later, Terrence Malick's US film The Tree of Life, with another original tale of a father and his two sons, and more obvious Biblical connections and a stronger role of their mother in contrast to The Return, won the top honor (the Golden Palm) at the Cannes film festival.)


P.S. The Return is one of top 15 films of the 21st Century for the author. Director Zvyagintsev's subsequent works--The Banishment (2007),  Elena (2011), and Leviathan (2014) have been extensively reviewed on this blog.