(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Image Facts.)
It is hard for Russian directors to escape comparison to Tarkovsky and his spiritual hybrids of form and substance. Newcomer Andrei Zvyagintsev is no exception to this rule for the most part. But there may be enough of a nuance to his latest film, The Return, that finally allows us to think of this director as one who stands on his own theoretical feet. Ceylan, with his recent film Distant, is doing a good enough job of filling Tarkovsky’s very large shoes anyway. Certainly The Return is marked by all the careful visualizing and the openly-paced storytelling that characterizes the Russian masters, but in this film we seem to have such a different sort of story being told that it deserves a different sort of reading than most Russian films tend to receive.
Such analogies are always simplistic, but The Return is the sort of Russian film that Flannery O’Connor would make. Tarkovsky’s films do deal explicitly with spirituality and psychology of certain cultural situations, but they do so with a social or historical realism that roots the spiritual revelations of his films within the unfolding of concrete, historicized realities rather than mythical ones. (Obviously Solaris and Stalker are science fictional enough to be exceptions, but even these films develop an organic naturalism that most science fiction films fail to.) The Return on the other hand opts to be driven by overtly mythical overtones, and the strength of the film lies in Zvyangintsev’s uncanny knack for storytelling. He chooses simply to focus on his characters and their story instead of the culture of post-Soviet Russia, a theme which pervades much of contemporary Russian filmmaking.
The Return opens on the urban hollows of modern Russia. A sweeping tracking shot follows two boys as they race through the wet and muck of crumbling streets. By the time they reach their home we discover that they are brothers, and their mother is waiting outside the house to tell them some shocking news. With no warning, their father whom they have never seen has reappeared and would like to take them on a fishing trip for a few days.
The journey these two boys take with their father is Oedipal, rife with Christ images, marked by sea-change and sacrifice, and prodded along by mystery and tragedy. Reviewers have been quick to point out that the first time the boys see their father, he lays prone in their mother’s bed positioned exactly as Christ is in Mantegna’s “Lamentation Over The Dead Christ.” Their first experience with their father is the sharing of a blood red wine at the dinner table over broken bread, and the only photograph they have of him slips from the pages of a worn family Bible.
The stage is set for some seriously theological undertones. Eventually we find out that the boys’ father has taken them to a particular island on this fishing trip to dig up a small package that we never see the contents of. He has obviously planned the trip, even to the point of having an outboard motor stashed in his car that they affix to the rowboat they are using. But in the wake of their trip’s startling conclusion, the important of the package and the reason for this strange journey get lost in the remarkable change that happens to this man’s sons.
The implicit spirituality of the film besets even its blander moments with a heightened sense of reality. As the father tries his boys in a strange series of tests until they reach the island he is taking them to, one gets the impression that a much bigger story is being told than meets the eye. Even the title of the film, The Return, brackets the film with a looming ambiguity. We are not quite sure which return the title is referring to, the father to the sons or the sons to the world after a journey of intense mystery and discovery.