It would take one seriously myopic, heartless wretch to not fall madly, ardently in love with Andrey Zvyagintsev’s scintillating debut. Set in a lushly monochrome, distinctly post-Soviet Russia (the scaffolding may be everywhere, but the place still wears a grey, Stalinist pallor), The Return is revealed almost entirely through the eyes of the mollycoddled, petulant Vanya (Dobronravrov). When his long absent father (Lavronenko) returns unexpectedly and inexplicably having missed a decade of the pre-teen’s life, it threatens to blow the boy’s world apart.
Cosseted by his mother and supremely close (despite much furious squabbling) to his older brother Andrej (played with soft distinction by fifteen-year-old Garin who, tragically, drowned after the shoot), Vanya is resentful of this new authority figure from the off, but is even more put out when long-lost daddy takes them away on a remote fishing trip. While his elder sibling seems reasonably content with the new disciplinarian regime, Vanya is determined to revolt. Mind you, you can’t blame the kid. The only way this guy would make father of the year is if the competition were limited to Papa Doinel and Jack from The Shining.
He’s a brutish, butch bully with a roving eye for the ladies, little patience and a highly sinister aspect. I mean, where the hell did he spring from? Who are the strange men he meets on the boat? What’s in that box he digs up? And how could he leave two kids and such a foxy wife?
Small wonder that our young protagonist starts to worry what papa’s intentions are, especially when their enigmatic journey ends on an uninhabited, blackly forested island. Here, dysfunction abounds and tensions spiral toward an intense, thrilling, heart-in-the-mouth finale that is both devastating and paradoxically upbeat. This remarkably resonant feature is so pregnant with mystery and meaning it almost resembles a set of Matryoshka nesting dolls. The film functions simultaneously as survival odyssey, Oedipal epic, political allegory, near nightmarish childhood fable and mediation on masculinity and fraternal bonding. (You can pause for breath now.) Indeed, The Return may well be one of the finest movies on brothers and fathers and sons yet, so if you are a boy, or you happen to know any, you’re sure to get a kick out of it.
Of course, if you’re of a cineastic persuasion, then prepare to be dazzled. In fact, best wear dark colours on account of the possible drooling. Zvyagintsev has fashioned a work of incredible doleful beauty that curtseys before those Earth-en classics of Soviet cinema about peasants devoted to their tractors (the love that dare not speak its name), then lies prostate at Tarkovsky’s altar quoting liberally from the late master’s images (check out the glacially beautiful mother smoking a cigarette, the dead seagull, the Svankmajer-ordained darksome forest) in a manner that’s positively evangelical. The invited comparisons don’t end there. The sullen, petted Vanya owes much to the precocious child spy of the heartbreaking Ivan’s Childhood.
But The Return is far from being merely accomplished mimicry. Zvygintsev’s startling leap through Tarkovsky’s Mirror-glass-darkly (wisely) discards trippy Slavic mysticism in favour of a beautifully taut circular narrative enlivened by awe-inspiring performances.
Honestly, if Zvygintsev never does anything but Leslie Nielson movies in the future, he’ll still get my vote on the back of this classic-to-be. His woods may be so shadowed that you keep expecting to trip over a decomposing swan or Tchaikovsky’s wolf, but you won’t want to leave. I’m even sighing wistful right now.