The Return
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Movie Reviews of The Return
Movie Review: Unintentional Patricide?
Summary: 5 Stars
One of the beautiful aspects of Andrei Zvyaginstev's "The Return" is that it leaves open any interpretation. The film is emotional, intense, mysterious, minimalistic, and filmed with grayish hues to set a mood of impending questions from the beginning. Two young brothers come home to discover that their estranged father of twelve years is back. They are a bit perturbed and must confirm the reality of what's going on by looking at an old black and white photo taken many years ago to make sure there is a physical resemblance.
The father is a man of few words and intense sad eyes. He decides to take them on a trip to go fishing and camping. During this venture as the plot unravels we discover that this strange man is mean to both his sons. The older boy Andrey, wants his father's love and approval and overlooks the abuse, but the younger Ivan does not and is outspoken about it. The tension in the film keeps building since you have no clue what the father's intentions are and you often wonder why he even came back in the first place.
The young Ivan acts out towards his father and he is actually abandoned on a highway for many hours in heavy rain. Once the father felt Ivan had learned his lesson he goes, back to pick him up and they are stuck in the mud. While trying to drag the car out, the father bashes Andrey's face against the car giving him a bloody nose. After that incident, the quick-tempered Ivan questions if this man is even his father and contemplates stabbing him if he comes near him or tries to hurt him. He confides all this to his older brother, but Andrey being in denial just thinks Ivan is perhaps a bit paranoid.
They go to a shoreline, build a boat, and go off to a remote island. Events begin to get a little weird, the boys are always hungry, and father doesn't pay much attention to that matter and keeps disappearing. At one point, the father is found digging to what looks to be a grave, and digs out a little wooden box that we never find out what's in it. But why dig such a big hole the size of a grave?
Anyway, I don't want to give the film away anymore than I already have because it is a must see. YES IT HAS SUBTITLES, however this film is brilliantly directed, and it will make you wonder and ponder for hours. The ending is almost heartbreaking when those two frail boys have to drag their father's body into the boat to do the right thing, and when they finally get him into the boat (he was a large man), he looks like a much nicer person laying their dead in a coffin.
Movie Review: Astonishing and Unforgettable
Summary: 5 Stars
Brothers Andrey and Ivan go swimming with their friends and play chicken at high diving. Ivan wimps out and gets in a fight with his brother who joins their friends in mocking his cowardice. Then they go home to a bombshell. Their father is there. He hasn't been seen for 12 years and has inexplicably returned. What is more he is going to take them on a trip in his car. It's not clear quite where but fishing will, it seems, be involved. Off they go but it soon becomes clear the father-son bonding isn't really working out, especially with Ivan who is increasingly hostile and rebellious, insisting to his brother that there is something sinister and dangerous about this man. At times indeed it seems he might be right: we know nothing about this man, not even his name, never mind the identity of the person he `phones from the café or the contents of the strange box he digs up. At other times, it merely seems this is a fairly well-intentioned but awkward man with little understanding of how effectively to engage with young boys. In any case we observe rising tensions and a steadily growing sense of dread until the shocking climax where - well, I'm not such a dreadful spoilsport that I'm going to tell you.
This is youthful director Andrei Zvyganitzev's first movie. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, writers Vladimir Moiseyenko and Aleksandr Novototsky and composer Andrei Dergachyov are all also pretty new to the game. All five of them look like pretty good news for Russian cinema. Made for a tiny budget, this is a breathtakingly good movie: deep and beautiful and utterly unforgettable. Krichman's photography is phenomenal. The acting from the three leads, Konstantin Lavronenko as the taciturn and ambivalent father, and the two neophyte child actors Ivan Dobronravov as the petulant younger brother Ivan and Vladimir Garin as Andrei is consistently astonishing. (Heartbreakingly, Garin died in a swimming accident before the film was released.) It's full of scenes that could not be more perfectly realized. One that stands out for me is where Ivan, after a fight with his dad, is briefly abandoned alone on a bridge over a river. He sees a lorry approaching in the distances. It reaches him and drives past. That's all but,...wow. I grant you it certainly doesn't sound very exciting. But then neither does Omar Sharif appearing in the distance and slowly approaching Peter O'Toole across the sand sound very exciting to people who haven't seen `Lawrence of Arabia.' Just watch it: you'll see what I mean.
Movie Review: Hitchcock suspense, modern Russian backdrop
Summary: 5 Stars
Some reviews call the film boring, plotless,
lacking message. I thought it was a very
simple, but highly imaginative plot.
At times the film moves slowly but it's a
sleeper which climaxes brilliantly and leaves
you stunned.
As for the "message", the "message" may
be lost on Americans because the film's
characters and their problems are quite
Russian.
The father is a macho, laconic, at times
physically abusive, a drinker--not your
sensitive American type father. He's
quite Russian, actually.
The boys are fatherless for 12 years until
he returns. Why was he gone and why so
casually does he return?
Possibly, he's a Russian mafia type wanted
by authorities or by the mob for a botched
deal or murder.
But the tension of the film seems to lie
in the boys' young minds: why did father
leave us? Does he love us ? Would he hurt
us ? Who is he really ? A criminal ?
This tension is what I mean by "Hitchcock
suspense".
And the very macho, laconic Russian male
figure adds to the suspense. The father
and the sons do at the end what suppressed
emotional figures tend to do in real life--
they explode with passion.
The theme of fatherless children is very
Russian when you consider that Russia
lost 25 million to the Nazi invasion. At
least two other Russian films I can think
of deal with similar issues.
If the film has any "message", it would
be that "Still Waters Run Deep". Men
are not so much lacking in emotion as
they are overwhelmed by its intensity
and unable to express it.
The boy's father is such a figure. He
seems devoid of emotion, a very macho,
seemingly uncaring.
But at the end, you find out how much
he really may have cared for his sons.
And one may suspect that it might have
been his very love for them that caused
him to go away--perhaps to spare them
the danger of being involved in his
shady dealings.
The father is redeemed at the end and
questions about his love for the boys
seem answered.
The tragedy of his character is that he
was unable to communicate well with the very
people he cared most about until it was
too late.
Movie Review: A brilliant debut
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Return" is one of the best movies to have recently come out of Russia. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev, who has been compared to Tarkovsky by quite a few critics, does a wonderful job, and so do the three main actors Konstantin Lavronenko (the father) and Vladimir Garin and Ivan Dobronravov (as Andrey and Vanya, the sons).
The movie opens with the two brothers running. They play on the windy lakeshore with their friends, jumping off a tower into the dark water. The younger boy is too scared to jump, but too reluctant to climb down for fear of being branded a chicken. When his worried mom ultimately finds him, he declares that he would have died up there if she hadn't. Life flows by as usual. It changes when the brothers come back home one day and their mom whispers to them, "Be quiet, your father is sleeping". Their father (with suggested links to the Russian mafia) had not been home in the last twelve years and their only recollections about him are from an old black and white photograph. He plans a weeklong fishing trip with the kids to get to know them again. He is a stranger to them, and in contrast to their mother, is someone who doesn't tolerate childhood tantrums and sulking and wants them to grow up and learn to deal with life the hard way. The younger boy has a miserable time, while the elder one is torn between suspicion and the desire to bond with his father. They eventually start out for an island and when the boat's motor splutters and stops, their dad makes them row. Exhausted, they reach the island ... it is here under the grey skies that the story reaches its unexpected climax.
Throughout the movie the atmosphere is gloomy and the dialogue is sparse. The movie was shot in the Siberian pine forests near the border of Russia and Finland, and the overcast sky and the drizzle work to complement the sombre moods of the characters. A lot of what the audience carries away from the movie are only suggested and never explicitly mentioned. At the end of it, we realize that we know hardly anything about the characters that we had been following for the past 105 minutes other than watching their emotions at play. All these work together to transform this thriller into an unsettling psychological study seeped in Russian mysticism.
Movie Review: A spectacular debut with layer after layer of depth
Summary: 5 Stars
Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2003 debut, 'Vozvrashcheniye' ('The Return') throws into sharp contrast much of the dreck that has come out of Hollywood for 200 times the cost of Zvyagintsev's reported $500,000 budget. This is an incredible film with layer upon layer of meaning and interpretation. The writers, the cinematographer and director demonstrate nothing short of genius here.
It's tough to even begin to talk about the movie without revealing too much. A father - gone for 12 years - returns. Prison? Mafia? These are the prosaic reasons my wife and I came up with. A 63-minute documentatary on the DVD gives you some insight into the shoot, the funding, how the project came together, etc. But the essence of the film itself - the script, the story concept, its staging - remains inscrutable and opaque. But after seeing the viewer commentary posted on IMDB, I realized that my understanding of the film had only scratched the surface...there are overtly religious overtones at play here (including one spot-on restaging of Andrea Mantegna's "The Dead Christ"), some possible commentary about the last days of Communism vs. the 'new' Russia, and one further interpretation about the brothers and their diary that completely turned the movie on its head and - upon further review and thinking - I now see as a brilliant revelation. Again: it's genius that Zvyagintsev and crew have layered all this in and have us all talking and interpreting and re-thinking.
I had come here with the intention of waxing poetic about the acting skills of 'younger son' Ivan, as played masterfully by Ivan Dobronravov. But nothing I say is going to top the previous reviewer's comment that he makes Haley Joel Osmont (in 'The Sixth Sense') look like the red-headed kid from Different Strokes. Now, that's a brilliant way to state it. Touché, sir!
Tragically, this will be Vladimir Garin's (elder son Andrey) only film. He drowned shortly after the filming completed and before the movie hit the big screen in art houses here in mid-2004. He wasn't as strong an actor as young Dobronravov, but towards the end of the film, you can feel him gaining confidence. The filmmakers even make note of the fact that by the end Garin was leading them. A real tragedy.