218. Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film “Nelyubov” (Loveless) (2017) (Russia), based on his co-scripted original screenplay with Oleg Negin: Indirectly encapsulating the state of politics in Russia from late 2012 to December 2015 and religion as practised today in that country.

On the very obvious level, Loveless is a modern tale of a middle-class family living in Moscow. Boris and Zhenya, the parents of a 12 year old schoolboy Aloysha, are on the verge of a divorce.  This might appear to be a tale of the disappearance of the anguished kid deprived of parental love—but the film is much more.  What is not so obvious in Loveless, is precisely what makes the film outstanding—as is the case of any Zvyagintsev feature film. The key to appreciating Zvyagintsev is to “suspend your belief” in the obvious and re-evaluate what was presented. And every shot of his films is loaded with silent commentary for any astute viewer to pick up and relish.

There is a special flavour that exudes from original screenplays conceived by directors in contrast to adapted screenplays based on novels, plays and historical events. That  flavour will make an erudite viewer sit up. Barring the exception of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Banishment (built on the framework of the US novelist William Saroyan’s The Laughing Matter) all four other Zvyagintsev’s films are based on the original screenplays.  The last four of the five Zvyagintsev feature films were co-scripted with Oleg Negov. If there is one common thread that binds all the five works --it would be love and absence of love, often within the walls of a family. To the more astute viewer, there are two other common perspectives in all the five films: the political state of Russia and religion in Russia, as practised by the Russian Orthodox Church today.  These statements are explained in the paragraphs that follow.

Aloysha: at the mercy of parents who want to divorce

Zvygaintsev in an interview with Nancy Tartaglione published in Nov 2017 in www.deadline.com stated (http://deadline.com/2017/11/loveless-andrey-zvyagintsev-oscars-interview-news-1202209229/) “These events (in Loveless) take place against a very specific historical background. The film begins in October of 2012, when people were full of hope and were waiting for changes in the political climate, when they thought that the state would listen to them. But 2015 is the climax of their disappointment: The feeling that there is no hope for positive changes, the atmosphere of aggression and the militarization of society, and the feeling that they are surrounded by enemies.” This statement is further testimony to what any Zvyagintsev film enthusiast already knew; that all Zvyagintsev films’ plots can be viewed as political metaphors/allegories. Zvyagintsev’s and Negin’s Aloysha is an obvious allegory of Russia today.

Boris: the father who is more worried about keeping his job after the divorce
than looking after his son

Zhenya: the mother more interested in a richer lifestyle after the divorce

Zvyagintsev’s first film The Return was about two young boys who grew up in the apparent absence of love from their biological father and their affinity to him when he does return.  When the kids understand their father’s love, it is too late. In his second film Banishment, the focus is on love and absence of love between mother and father, as also between father and children.  When the husband ultimately appreciates his wife’s love for him, it is too late. In Zvyagintsev’s third film Elena, a rich man has a hedonistic daughter from his first marriage, a grown-up offspring whom he loves but that love is only reciprocated by her in an aloof manner. Elena, also has a biological son, daughter-in law and grandson from an earlier marriage, whom she loves and cares for financially. The focus of Elena is also on the love or the lack of love between husband and wife. In Zvyagintsev’s fourth film Leviathan, the husband forgives his erring wife and obviously intensely loves her and their son.  That film had included a sermon by a Russian Orthodox priest in the church (towards the end of the film) that stated "Love dwells not in strength but in love". Thus, love or lack of it within the family connects all the five Zvyagintsev films.

Apart from Zvyaginstev, much of the high quality of the last four films ought to be attributed to co-scriptwriter Oleg Negin. Their collaboration is akin to late career collaborations on scripts of director Andrei Konchalovsky with Elena Kiseleva, of director Krzysztof Kieslowski with Krzysztof Piesiewicz, of director Aleksandr Sokurov with Yuri Arabov, and of director Ken Loach with Paul Laverty. Each of these collaborations has been spectacular. In Loveless, the script reflects the socio-political Russia (mention of the Ukraine war on television is like a loss of a child to father Russia), partially cut trees preparing the ground for more concrete constructions, while older buildings are crumbling, uninhabited and neglected. (In doing so, they seem to be paying a silent tribute to Andrey Tarkovsky’s films Stalker and Solaris.)

Loveless may seem to be lacking in the religious fervour of the scriptwriters more obvious in the earlier works such as Leviathan and Banishment.  Is it really so? Boris and his co-worker at work talk about their boss (they refer to him as “Beardy”) as a fundamentalist Christian who wants all his employees to be happily married, if they want to keep their jobs.  Another worker, it is revealed, who was not happily married, paid someone to act as his wife and progeny at an official get together to keep his job.  Zvyagintsev revealed in an interview that the character of Beardy was built on a real Russian industrialist with a similar mindset.  Zvyagintsev is a deeply religious director who is disapproving fundamentalist religious fervour indirectly in Loveless.  Similarly, when Zhenya’s mother invokes God briefly, it is not a religious outburst but more of a reflex comment from a “Stalin in skirts,” as Boris describes his mother-in-law, invoking God.  Zvyagintsev and Negin are clearly pointing to the lack of understanding of religion of those who profess their faith but act to the contrary. Another commentary on Russia today!

When the police force gives up on locating Aloysha, social groups get into the act without any monetary reward. Even though Zvyagintsev protests that his films are universal and not social or political, it might be a strange coincidence that the age of Aloysha is precisely the number of years Putin has headed the Russian government.

The mother is more concerned with her smartphone
than looking after her biological son,
who she claims is even beginning to smell like his father

The absence of love in Loveless is not merely between a set of divorcing parents and their growing son.  There is no love lost between Zhenya and her mother, the “Stalin in skirts,” who lives alone in a fortress, hardly ever in touch with her daughter.  In the search for the missing Aloysha, the police find a body of a similar 12 year old—evidently there are other Aloyshas in Russia today. Perhaps the current generation is behaving thus because of how their parents behaved and acted religious in the past when they did not translate their belief into actions.

What are the reasons for these instances of absence of love? Loveless suggests that it could be hedonism, the love for modern smart-phones overtaking interest in their immediate family, or it could even be the pursuit of wealth and comfort.

Much of these opinions are not said overtly but effectively captured by Zvyagintsev and cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, as they did together in four of the five Zvyagintsev films. Krichman’s camera lingers to capture more than the action, he focuses on the environment that plays a silent role in the events. Krichman is emerging as a major cinematographer alive and making films today.  The best sequence of Loveless is the silent scream of Aloysha, reminiscent of actor Rod Steiger’s final anguished scream towards the end in The Pawnbroker (1964).

Zvyagintsev is also a master of using silent sequences for effect followed by pulsating minimalist music. He had used Philip Glass’ music very effective in both Elena and Leviathan. In Banishment, he had used the music of Arvo Part.  In Loveless, he asked Evgueni and Sacha Galperine, a French duo, to compose the music by merely providing the story.  They came up with “11 cycles of E” made of one note and one rhythm, which is quite similar to the soundtrack of Elena.  The Galperines won the European Film Award for Best Composer with the interesting citation that stated the intelligent piano effects made the score work like an extra character added to the unfortunate family.

The first and closing sequences of both Elena and Loveless have a similar and familiar Zvyagintsev signature: the sound/images of a hooded crow cawing on leafless trees in bleak and cold exterior shots of an urban setting. It is depressing. Yet the subjects of these five films are broadly, truly universal. 

One of the final sequences with "Russia" in bold
to reiterate the unsaid 

Is this the best work of Zvyagintsev? Though the film Lovelessis remarkable in most respects, the lengthy hedonistic scenes make the previous works of the director more palatable.Leviathan was definitely more complex than Loveless. Yet Lovelessmight prove to have more universal appeal than his other profound works.

P.S. The film Loveless won the Jury Prize award at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival and the Best Film award at the London and the Zagreb Film Festivals. It won the Silver Frog at the Cameraimage festival for its cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who also won the best cinematographer award at the European Film Awards. Zvyagintsev won the Best Director award at the Asia Pacific Screen awards.  The four Zvyagintsev films The Return, Banishment, Elena, and Leviathan have been reviewed earlier on this blog. (Click on the name of the film in this post script to access each review). Loveless is one of the top 10 films of 2017 for the author. Zvyagintsev is one of the top 10 active film directors for the author.

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171. Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s film “Leviathan” (2014): A bold political film made with a superb aesthetic flourish

“During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man.” Thomas Hobbes, in his political book on statecraft called Leviathan, published in 1651

“Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it  speak to you with gentle words? Will it make an agreement with you for you to take it as your slave for life? Can you make a pet of it like a bird or put it on a leash for the young women in your house? Will traders barter for it? Will they divide it up among the merchants? Can you fill its hide with harpoons or its head with fishing spears? If you lay a hand on it, you will remember the struggle and never do it again! Any hope of subduing it is false; the mere sight of  it is overpowering." Book of Job, Chapter 41, 1-9 in the Holy Bible (Job is referred to as Ayub in the Holy Koran) (This quotation is recalled in part by the priest in Zvyagintsev's film Leviathan)

All the four Andrei Zvyagintsev feature films—The Return, The Banishment, Elena, and Leviathan  provide an unusual amalgam of family relationships, politics, religion, philosophy, literature, psychology, sociology,  visual metaphors  and music. Each element grips the viewer when recognized in each of the films. Each element provokes inward looking questions in the minds of the viewers. Zvyagintsev is one of the best filmmakers worldwide who consistently make awesome films for those who can appreciate serious cinema—alongside directors such as Terrence Malick (USA), Carlos Reygadas (Mexico), Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Turkey), Paolo Sorrentino (Italy), and Naomi Kawase (Japan).

Each of Zvyagintsev’s four films have deservedly won major accolades at premier film festivals (the Golden Lion at Venice for The Return; the Best Actor award at Cannes for Banishment; the Un Certain Regard section Jury prize at Cannes, Silver Peacock for Best Actress at the Indian International Film Festival in Goa,  and the Grand Prize at the Ghent International festival for Elena;  Best Screenplay award at Cannes, the Golden Peacock for Best Film and the Silver Peacock for Best Actor at the Indian International Film Festival in Goa, and the Best Film at the London Film Festival for Leviathan).

Zvyagintsev's Job is the honest Nikolai (shortened to Kolya in the film) willing
to forgive an erring wife: A Silver-Peacock-winning performance
by Alexei Serebryakov 

At a very elementary level, Leviathan is a tale of an honest man resisting the wiles of a corrupt Mayor of his coastal town to grab the land on which he and his ancestors lived. The honest man Nikolai --shortened to Kolya-- (Alexei  Serebryakov) is on the verge of losing his house when even the courts go against him.  His former friend from his Army days Dimitri—shortened to Dimi--, now a high flying lawyer practicing in Moscow, arrives with powerful connections and documents to checkmate the corrupt Mayor. The tragedy that follows is not far removed from a Biblical character called Job (or Ayub, if you are a Muslim).

When critics like me discover and point out elements of politics and theology in Zvyagitsev’s entire oeuvvre, readers are sceptical if too much is ascribed to a film beyond the obvious narrative tale. In the earlier films of Zvyagintsev, politics and theology were partly hidden behind visual and aural symbols. Many viewers of the first three Zvyagintsev films would have discounted the theological elements unless they were well read in the scriptures and acquainted with the cinema of Andrei Tarkovksy. Both the late Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky and  Andrei Zvyagintsev (the latter is in his early fifties)  are intellectuals who have good knowledge of Christian scriptures and use them to enhance the depth of their cinema.  

The title of the film Leviathan comes from two interlinked sources:  the Biblical Book of Job (Chapter 41) and Thomas Hobbes’ political book Leviathan  (published in 1651) on statecraft linking politics and religion. Unlike Zvyagintsev’s preceding three films, where religion and politics remained partly hidden, in Leviathan Zvyagintsev openly discusses both elements. There is a scene in Leviathan where wall portraits of past Russian leaders Lenin, Stalin, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev are consciously used as targets for rifle shooting during a picnic and even Yeltsin is disparagingly referred in the dialogue.  (Putin is not included here, but a photograph of Putin is discretely on the wall in the Mayor's office, just as Tarkovsky added Trotsky’s photograph on the wall in a brief scene in Mirror.) Religion, too, comes to the fore in Leviathan, as the Book of Job passage is quoted by a priest in the film and the penultimate ironical sequence is a church sermon by a bishop with the villainous mayor and his family listening to it with piety.  Tarkovsky, who could never be bold to openly criticize the Russian politics, would have been delighted to see what Zvyagintsev has achieved in Leviathan. One guesses that Zvyagintsev realized that his political and religious statements through symbols used in his earlier works did not reach out to a wide audience and he had to be more explicit in Leviathan. Even the TV program shown briefly in Leviathan is discussing the Pussy Riot case. Ironically, Leviathan is Russia’s official entry to the 2015 Oscars.

It is therefore relevant to reproduce below  the director Andrei Zvyagintsev’s statement provided at the Cannes film festival for the media on his film Leviathan: 

“When a man feels the tight grip of anxiety in the face of need and uncertainty, when he gets overwhelmed with hazy images of the future, scared for his loved ones, and fearful of death on the prowl, what can he do except give up his freedom and free will, and hand these treasures over willingly to a trustworthy person in exchange for deceptive guarantees of security, social protection, or even of an illusory community?”

 “Thomas Hobbes’ outlook on the state is that of a philosopher on man’s deal with the devil: he sees it as a monster created by man to prevent ‘the war of all against all’, and by the understandable will to achieve security in exchange for freedom, man’s sole true possession.”

 “Just like we are all, from birth, marked by the original sin, we are all born in a ‘state’. The spiritual power of the state over man knows no limit.”

“The arduous alliance between man and the state has been a theme of life in Russia for quite a long time. But if my film is rooted in the Russian land, it is only because I feel no kinship, no genetic link with anything else. Yet I am deeply convinced that, whatever society each and everyone of us lives in, from the most developed to the most archaic, we will all be faced one day with the following alternative: either live as a slave or live as a free man. And if we naively think that there must be a kind of state power that can free us from that choice, we are seriously  mistaken. In the life of every man, there comes a time when one is faced with the system, with the “world”, and must stand up for his sense of justice, his sense of God on Earth.”

“It is still possible today to ask these questions to the audience and to find a tragic hero in our land, a ‘son of God’, a character who has been tragic from time immemorial, and this is precisely the reason why my homeland isn’t lost yet to me, or to those who have made this film.”

The predicament of the character Job of the Bible is not far removed from the pile of misfortunes heaped on a good man Nikolai or Kolya in Leviathan. Zvyagintsev, like Tarkovsky, is very familiar with the Bible and weave elements from it into his films.  Nikolai in Leviathan represents the average good Russian.  

The good working class Kolya is broken like Job in the Bible from all sides
as misfortunes pile up: yet he forgives his erring wife

Co-scriptwriter Oleg Negin worked on the last three Zvyagintsev films including Leviathan. Zvyagintsev and Negin weave in politics and religion with a rare felicity; they bring to mind the collaboration of the Polish Kieslowski and his co-scriptwriter Piesiewicz. However, Zvyagintsev’s collaboration with music composer Philip Glass is limited to Elenaand Leviathan. Philip Glass’ music used in the film was Glass’ composition Akhnaten, the Pharaoh, who practiced monotheism in ancient Egypt. That operatic musical composition  also deals with power and religion, not far removed from the subject of Leviathan. The use of Glass’ music in the two Zvyagintsev films could serve as a master-class for some of the Hollywood’s currently feted directors because Zvyagintsev uses music only when it is essential and relevant and adjusts the volume with care. The rest is diagetic sound on his film soundtracks.  The third major Zvyagintsev collaborator is his cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who continues to contribute richly to the visual canvas in all the four Zvyagintsev films. While most viewers will recall the fossilized bones of a blue whale in Leviathan, the most enigmatic shot in the film is the shot of a live whale in the distance at a key points\ in the film—the last scene of Kolya’s wife alive in the film as she contemplates the sea and her predicament. What Zvyagintsev and Krichman achieved in Leviathan in the final snowbound sequence was ironically close to the final shots of Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep, the Turkish film that competed with Leviathan and won the top prize at the 2014 Cannes film festival. Though both are amazing films, Leviathan, for this critic had more plus points when comparing both. Most importantly, Leviathan was more original in content than the Golden Palm winning Winter Sleep, which was anchored to a Chekov story. Most of all, Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, though referring to Hobbes and the Bible, is extraordinarily brave in showcasing the corruption in contemporary non-Communist Russia. And like Ceylan's Winter Sleep, Leviathan also underscores the plight of the poor when the rich and powerful people, crush their lives. Even the motives behind an apparent good deed to adopt a friend's teenage son is questioned in the film.

Zvyagintsev’s cinema is not the run-of-the-mill cinema. Many crucial scenes of the tale are never shown on screen—he prefers to show the aftermath. The viewer is forced to imagine what could have happened. The fight between Nikolai and Dimitri is never shown; we only see Dimitri’s injured face. The death of Kolya’s wife is never shown; only her dead body is shown.  The evil antagonist forces are described in a reverse quixotic detail when the corrupt Mayor asks Dimitri, the lawyer, if he was baptized, when Dimitri confronts the Mayor with the evidence of his "sins." What a loaded question, and the irony is, who is asking! The Orthodox Bishop asks the corrupt Mayor "We are in God's house. Did you take communion?" and reminds him that both are doing God's work.  One of the final scenes is of the corrupt Mayor’s child looking up at the church’s ceiling after the sermon which includes the statement of the Bishop "Love dwells not in strength but in love". Nothing in Zvyagintsev’s cinema is without considered thought. An intelligent viewer has to pick up the details. And as in Elena, Leviathan too ends with squawking of a crow on the soundtrack, before the colorful and deep music of Philip Glass takes over for the finale.

Kolya's teenaged son Roma mopes over his stepmother's unethical actions: Zvyagintsev's
imagery of  a fossilized "Leviathan" is brought into perspective

Children and boys in particular played major roles in all the four Zvyagintsev feature films. In Elenaand Leviathan, the young boys find alternate entertainment with their friends far away from home.  In Elena,the youngsters fight among themselves; in Leviathan, the youngsters are less boisterous and appear drugged/drunk, no longer fighting among themselves to achieve something. The boys gather in a broken-down unused church.  Zvyagintsev is evidently making a time-based sociological statement on Russian youth and the Russian Orthodox Church.  Young-boys-revolting-against-their-parents is a recurring theme for Zvyagintsev. InLeviathan, the son Roma is born from a first marriage of Kolya and his anger against his stepmother is understandable. When Dimitri is beaten up and threatened to be shot to death by the Mayor, Dimitri is asked if he has any thoughts for his daughter we never see. What Zvyagintsev shows us instead is a little girl on the train Dimitri is taking back to Moscow, possibly reminding Dimitri of his own.

In Leviathan, the wife is ambiguous embodying both the good and the evil, whom the
good Kolya forgives 

Wives in all Zvyagintsev’s films are interesting to study: some good, some evil, and some ambiguous in their actions. In Leviathan, the wife is ambiguous—we can only guess why she acted the way she did. She strays from the path of a good wife but chooses to return to her husband. In The Return, the viewer is never told why the father was absent for years. Zvyagintsev apparently believes that the jigsaw puzzles (a motif used in The Banishment) he presents in his films in varied ways can be completed by an intelligent viewer. He does not believe in spoon feeding his audience. Lilya, thw wife in Leviathan, asks her lover Dimitri "Do you believe in God?" Evidently she does.

To end this review, it might be more than relevant to again quote from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan:  “He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.” The enigmatic shot of the live whale in the distance towards the final minutes of the film exemplifies this last Hobbes quote.


P.S. All the three preceding Zvyagintsev films--The Return, The Banishment, and Elena--have been reviewed in detail earlier on this blog. Leviathan is the best of the 10 top films of 2014 for the author and is one of top 15 films of the 21st Century for him. It has subsequently won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. Mr Zvyagintsev is also one of the author's 15 favourite active filmmakers.

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115. Russian director Aleksei Popogrebsky’s film “Kak ya provyol etim letom” (How I Ended This Summer) (2010): Psychological cinematic perspectives on old vs. new, and duty vs. freedom

For the entire duration of this captivating film that won the Golden Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival and the Best Film award at the London Film Festival, the viewer sees merely two individuals, one young (Pavel) and the other (Sergei) much older, old enough to be the other one’s father.  Both are living on a remote island inhabited perhaps by polar bears and nothing else. Then you don’t get to see the bears (except once), you only hear conversations between the two men about bears. One is a university student, the other a meteorologist. The only other human beings that intrude the script are the voice of a man on the mainland who keeps in touch with the denizens over a fragile radio wavelength. The conversation on the radio link is often limited to transmitting scientific data that seems to include meteorological data as well as radioactivity captured on a Geiger counter.

Director Popogrebsky presents a film that first engages you visually. Popogrebsky’s two major collaborators on this film, as on his earlier film Simple Things, are the cinematographer Pavel Kostomarov (winning a Silver Bear for this film at Berlin Film Festival 2010 and the Golden Eagle in Russia) and composer of music, Dimitry Katkhanov. You first see the sea and the land and you marvel at the natural beauty of the landscape, goaded along aurally by the music on the soundtrack.  Then the director shows you rusty contraptions that are buzzing, emitting sufficient radioactivity to make a Geiger counter come alive to produce frenetic, rapid clicks. No words are spoken but the message is gently conveyed—you, the viewer, are being introduced from beauty to ugliness. Later you are shown fields full of old jerry cans that contain liquid fuel, also rusting, all left behind years ago—a graveyard of junk that had once served many people in the past. But where are those people? The people who erected the radioactive contraptions, the sheds, the few buildings, where are they? And why is a young university student carrying a Geiger counter, while listening to rock music? You are introduced to images that remind you of the dead terrain of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. If you think the connection is outrageous, you will see the video game played by the young man is also called STALKER.

Popogrebsky has made the film using his own script and is evidently influenced by Tarkovsky. He presents a tale of confrontation between two individuals who come together by fate on this lonely yet lovely corner of the world. The viewer is introduced gradually to a father-son relationship though the two are not related. You note that the old man belongs to the old school who believes in gathering and transmitting the facile data to a faceless recipient, miles away. The young man has his clear order of priorities--music, video games, sleep and lower on the priority rung, gathering and transmitting correct data. You anticipate confrontation between the flag of freedom and the flag of rules. Instead you see teacher-student, a father-son relationship that appears to develop, even though in the old school the elders taught the young using fear tactics to keep the young ones in check. It is easy for the viewer to note that the young man has a growing respect for the elder, who has a wife and child. You feel director Popogrebsky is now treading close to Andrei Zvyaginstev’s cinema (The Return).

But the psychologist in Popogrebsky surfaces later. The young man learns from a radio message that the old man’s wife and child are killed but for a strange reason does not convey the information immediately to the elder man. Why is that? Is he afraid of causing misery to a man who had gone fishing trout to salt and take that precious catch to his wife and child as a gift? Or is it that the old man has been tough with him?

The delay in revealing the facts and the eventual transmission of the vital information leads to events that provide a thriller element to the essentially psychological tale. But the film is able to go beyond the level of a thriller—a tale of an old man who was provided delayed information on the death of his loved ones by a young man whom he treated as a son.

Popogrebsky falls into trap of his own making. The script is written as from the viewpoint of the young man. Within that scope, the story unfolds from the perspective of the young and not of the elder individual. In case Popogrebsky had not resorted to this format and had presented the story as a third person’s view of the tale, it is possible the movie would have had a different impact on the viewer. Tarkovsky adopted such a perspective in his last film, The Sacrifice, where the film is from the father’s point of view while Zvyagintsev attempted it with a flourish in The Return, where the entire story was from the elder son’s point of view. But unfortunately Popogrebsky avoids extensive analysis of the narrator, a flaw that is not so obvious in Tarkovsky and Zvyaginstsev. But all three films/directors were dealing with similar themes: old vs. new, father vs. son, political allegories, etc. While Popogrebsky is able to convey the dark message of radiation poisoning, the final sacrifice of the elder for the younger and end the film with visual optimistic message of a dark sky becoming bright, the focus of the film is turned at the end toward the elder of the duo.        

The captivating film ends with the narrator in a position to write a university paper on how he spent his summer on an island with an elderly man. Is the old man psychologically unstable or is he a very wise old man capable of making decisions the import of which dawns on others much later? It even tends to glorify the lonely, elderly widower slowly dying of radiation on an isolated island. What Popogrebsky, the psychologist, does to the viewer is to make viewer think why young people refrain from doing certain actions. Is it fear? Is it empathy? Is it love? Or is it a flaw in all of us human beings that makes us stumble at a critical point in our lives?



However, if you want to enjoy the film at a different level replace the young man with modern Russia and the elder with the erstwhile Soviet Union, and ask yourself the same questions. The radioactive, rusty machines could then appear meaningful for the viewer than a mere art director's prop. This is precisely where both Popogrebsky's film How I Ended This Summer and Zvyagintsev's The Return reach a point of confluence. 

While Popogrebsky may not be of the same class as Tarkovsky or Zvyagintsev, there is no denying that he is a notable Russian director. Evidently he has a tremendous verve in dealing with actors: both his actors in this film won a Silver Bear each for acting at the Berlin Film Festival—a rare achievement. And Popogrebsky had done this before, as the actor in his previous feature film Simple Things also won best actor awards at two festivals. I do hope that Popogrebsky’s next work improves on this one—he is younger than Zvyagintsev--while continues to work with cameraman Kostomarov and composer Kastkhanov. They make a great team behind the camera.

P.S.  Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return was reviewed earlier on this blog.

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