Izgnanie
Andrey Zvyagintsev (2007)
A pleasant country landscape – blue sky, no people; the only sound is birdsong. Then a car comes into shot and soon becomes the centre of attention. During its journey, the sonic and visual atmospheres darken. Mechanical noise (the car engine, a passing train) is increasingly in evidence. By the time the car reaches its destination, an apartment in an urban street, it’s nightfall and pouring with rain, and an ominous low throb dominates the soundtrack. That noise calls to mind the opening of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first feature The Return (2003) and like Loveless, his latest, The Banishment turns out to be morally censorious, though Zvyagintsev’s attitude towards his characters is less hostile and dismissive in this earlier work. The second of his five features to date, The Banishment is the only one with an adapted rather than an original screenplay: the source material is a 1953 novel, The Laughing Matter, by the Armenian-American William Saroyan. The screenplay is by Artyom Melkumian and Oleg Negin.
The story, relocated to present-day Russia, centres on the marriage of Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko) and Vera (Maria Bonnevie). While they and their two children are on holiday in the country, in the house that Alex grew up in, Vera tells her husband that she’s pregnant. The couple’s relationship isn’t good and Alex assumes the baby isn’t his. While driving to meet his elder brother Mark (Aleksandr Baluev), Alex decides, on the strength of a remark made by his son Kir (Maksim Shibayev), that Vera has been having an affair with, and made pregnant by, his friend Robert (Dmitri Ulyanov). Alex insists to Vera that the only way their marriage can be saved is by her having an abortion. With Mark’s help, he arranges for this to be carried out while Kir and his sister Eva (Katya Kulkina) are staying with the children of friends of Alex and Vera. Shortly after the abortionist has left, Alex finds his wife unconscious. Mark summons another doctor, Viktor (Igor Sergeev), but Vera dies shortly afterwards. Viktor tells Mark that he suspects that, by taking all the pain relief medication the abortionist left with her, she has committed suicide. Viktor also finds at Vera’s bedside, and shows to Mark, a copy of a form that confirms her pregnancy test results, with a note she has written on the back of the form. Mark, who doesn’t disclose these things to Alex, takes charge of hurriedly organising Vera’s funeral but suffers a heart attack. Insisting against Viktor’s advice on attending, Mark dies on the return from the funeral. Alex drives back to the city (a virtual reprise of Mark’s journey, which began the film) to take revenge on Robert. Just before doing so, he discovers in his car’s glove compartment, which also contains the gun he means to use, the pregnancy test form and Vera’s note. This makes clear that Alex was the father of the child she was expecting. An extended (awkward) flashback describes Robert’s visits to the family apartment, including the visit made in Alex’s absence, that Kir mentioned. The flashback reveals that Vera attempted suicide with a drugs overdose; that Robert saved her life; and that she confided in him that she felt the child inside her wasn’t really hers and Alex’s because their relationship had become so limited.
The slow-paced narrative and deliberate camera movement – especially the repeated fixation on natural world images – seem designed to convey the gravity of The Banishment’s moral discourse and to make clear that this is the tragedy of more than a single family. Improbable bits of plotting – such as the timing of Alex’s discovery of Vera’s note – reinforce, whether intentionally or not, a sense that Zvyagintsev is interested more in metaphor than in realism. So too do the characters’ sketchy backgrounds. Mark and Alex appear to be professional criminals – at the start, Mark arrives at his brother’s apartment with a gunshot wound to his arm and instructs Alex to remove the bullet – but the nature of their criminal activities remains unclear. In Zvyagintsev’s treatment of failure of communication within a marriage, the theme’s symbolic force eclipses realistic probability. Alex admits to Vera at one point that he’s afraid to talk with her but feels nevertheless that they should talk. It’s an opportunity for Vera to express her anxieties about how little they say to each other and why she can’t therefore bring herself to feel that the baby she’s carrying is theirs – but she stays silent.
The Banishment is absorbing but opaque: if it’s a critique of Putin’s Russia, it’s a good deal less explicit in this respect than Loveless (or Leviathan). What the viewer is meant to make of the apparently positive elements in the film is among its puzzling aspects. When Alex’s and Vera’s children go to stay with the other family, there’s a shot of the five kids, quietly absorbed and working together on what looks like a thousands-of-pieces jigsaw with a religious art subject. (They’re very close to completing it too.) At bedtime, one of the other couple’s children, guided by her mother, reads from 1 Corinthians 13 (‘If I … but do not have love, I am nothing …’). In contrast, Mark, when Alex seeks his advice on what he should do if Vera is pregnant by another man, assures his brother that whatever he chooses to do, whether it’s accepting the situation or killing Vera, will be the right thing to do. At the very end of the film, Alex – played powerfully but with fine control by Konstantin Lavronenko (also the father in The Return) – sits outdoors in the countryside, reflecting on what has happened. The camera moves to the last of the cinematographer Mikhail Krichman’s impressive painterly compositions – a field of reaping peasants, who deliver a traditional chant while they work. There is religious choral music over the closing credits. (The original music for the film is by Andrey Dergachyov but the soundtrack also includes some Arvo Pärt.) Hard as it is to believe that Andrey Zvyagintsev’s point of view is so simplistic, the effect of all this is to suggest that Russian life was better in the old days.
3 February 2018
