The Return
Vosvrashcenie
Andrey Zvyagintsev (2003)
An unusual and absorbing film, even though the lack of context provided for the characters tends to focus attention on the meaning of the story – which is easily susceptible to symbolic (specifically Freudian) readings – at the expense of interest in what’s going to happen, or in the characters themselves. A group of mostly early adolescent boys dive into a lake from a high platform. The pre-adolescent youngest of them Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) is too frightened to take his turn. The others, including Ivan’s elder brother Andrey (Vladimir Karin), contemptuously leave him stranded at the top of the platform. His mother Mat (Nataliya Vdovina) finds Ivan there – it seems hours later – weeping and shivering. Ivan tells her that, if she hadn’t come, he would never have been able to get down and back home. The next day, the boys’ father Otets (Konstantin Lavronenko) comes home too, after an absence of twelve years. There’s no explanation of what caused the absence or the return or of where Otets has been (in the one short scene where the mother and father are alone together they say not a word to each other). The day after that, the father takes his sons on a journey, further and further from home and mother, out of town, through forests, eventually to a remote island.
The elder boy is ready to enjoy the adventure – he’s amiable, mostly acquiescent, relatively slow-witted. The younger boy, loathing the experience, is intellectually and emotionally combative, questioning and challenging the father. (According to the scheme of the film, Ivan fails to put questions designed to elicit information. He asks ‘Why did you come back?’ rather than ‘Where have you been all these years?’ – but he gets no answers anyway.) The father behaves in a way which is, at times, borderline physically brutal and often seems psychologically cruel. (There are moments when his violent capriciousness even suggests an Old Testament God.) Yet one of the strongly mysterious elements in the film is the occasional suggestion that Otets, in spite of what he does and says, means well – and that he can’t express himself differently. The expedition reaches its climax when Ivan climbs to the top of a construction virtually identical to the diving platform. The father, coming after him (more protectively than menacingly), falls to his death from this construction. The boys, in their different ways, both seem to grow up at this point: Ivan gains in physical courage; Andrey’s face and voice suggest a new understanding. At the end of a gruelling journey home, during which the sons diligently guard the father’s body, it floats away and sinks when, exhausted, they rest at the edge of the lake and briefly fall asleep. It comes as no surprise, given the lack of realistic underpinning to the story, that we don’t see the boys’ reunion with, or the explanation they give to, their mother and grandmother (who shares the family home). What we do see – finally – is a series of photos they have taken of each other and of the landscapes they have been in over the last few days: these include no photograph of the father. (The images fill the screen, taking their place in a larger family album that moves back to the boys’ infancy.)
The extremes of weather that the father and his sons experience on their journey are used very effectively. The alternation of brilliant blue sky and driving rain is not just visually beautiful – it means that the audience is never allowed to settle, is kept guessing. The score and sound too have a subtly disorienting effect. And the three main actors all take the camera strongly in their physically contrasting ways. It’s hard either to watch or think of the film without being reminded that the young actor who played the elder son drowned shortly after filming was completed – in one of the lakes featured on screen. For various reasons, The Return stays with you.
8 May 2008