Russian Joy

4. 7. 2010 / Ema Čulík

The film is about a lorry driver, Georgij, who loses his way on the road, is chocked over the head with a birch log and is gradually drawn into Russian village life, complete with all its horrors. It is very reminiscent of Kirill Serebrennikov (head director at the Moscow Arts Theatre MXAT)'s 2008 film Jur'iev Den, Yurij Day, named after the one day in medieval Russia where things turned upside down and serfs were allowed their freedom. In the film, a successful and beautiful Moscow opera singer takes her son to see a village from her youth, he disappears, and while she is looking for him she degenerates from glamorous, multilingual, and cultured into the same sad state as the villagers around her. This film follows a similar pattern of degradation, but it is more brutal, and sprinkled with flashbacks to show that this sad situation has been around for a very long time.

It all begins when Georgij is stopped by the DPS, road police. Almost the whole scene is shot from within the driver's cabin of the van, hence showing Georgij, the policeman, the road, and a red sports car with a high-heeled blonde woman, who later accepts her penalty from them and agrees to 'pay it off' as she can. This long shot with static camera is used to great effect and is a glance back to his documentary style, which, though the scene is probably a little too perfect to have been real, it does seem like it is, as the camera is unobtrusive and calmly watches what is going on without making any comment about it.

This, however, is a dramatic film and such techniques are not used throughout. One interesting technique that appears a lot in the film is a view of the road, shot from the bonnet of the van. Watching this, you seem to get into the rhythm of the movement so much that when the 'vehicle' stops, your stomach jolts a little bit. These roads reminded me a lot of Gogol and Dead Souls, where Chichikov also travels from town to town meeting and presenting us specimens of rural Russia. Especially as Georgij is almost a blank canvas, meeting various troubled characters along his road, before he becomes one himself.

Driving at night, he loses his way and ends up parking himself in a field. Soon he is pounced upon by three local opportunists, who, after bungling the theft of Georgij's load, succeed in opening the van (by knocking him unconscious) and rip open the sacks inside only to find kilos of flour and no worthwhile loot. The knock obviously did him a great deal of damage, and Georgij gets stuck in the nearby village, with no medical help to speak of, plenty of unwelcoming neighbours, unsympathetic police, and the freezing winter to deal with.

With the exception of one old man "nameless" whom Georgij finds on the road, every single person in this film is willing to screw over anyone they meet in order to help themselves out. They are prepared to beat, blackmail, steal and kill to get even the smallest gain. Watching this film gives you a horrible impression about Russia, which Loznitsa claims is a real situation which nobody else knows about. Living in Russia myself, I do not come across such horrors in my daily life, though I have encountered a couple of nasty characters in my 4 or 5 years there. I cannot, however, speak for the villages, where I have been only very few times. However, I did see there poverty, lack of education and insularity which may well lead to such terrible behaviour as shown in this film. Nevertheless, I have the distinct impression that people in Russian cities are getting nicer -- more polite, kinder and more considerate. Perhaps, we can only hope, the villages will get better too.

Vytisknout