The Return

KINO INTERNATIONAL

ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV'S remarkable debut feature The Return, so reminiscent of the searing emotional and philosophical disquisitions of Andrei Tarkovsky, concerns two young boys, cared for by their mother and grandmother, who are shocked by the return of their long-absent father. Mercurial, moody and silent, he makes a less-than-ideal companion for a weekend trip, but the sons dutifully tag along. Having been absent for 12 years (a heavily symbolic length of time in this carefully plotted allegory), the father inspires widely differing responses in the two sons, Andrey and Ivan. Andrey, the older son, is more than willing to give his father the benefit of the doubt, and to fully cede authority to him, while Ivan, lacking paternal memories even from his infancy, fights tooth and nail against this incursion on their freedoms.

As the trio progresses through a series of harrowing adventures, the nature of the allegory grows clearer: The missing father, clearly, is the specter of communism. Petty, domineering, self-centered, cruel, the father (he is never named) returns, attempting to reassert control over his sons, abandoned to the reassurances of maternal love. Andrey, trusting, open-hearted and more than a little simple-minded, is the Russian everyman, assuming the best of his leaders. Ivan, coded by his all-black uniform as a member of the intelligentsia, refuses his father any form of domination over him. Trapped in the same car for much of the film, at the mercy of his whims, the underlying fear of this film, so pervasive that it clings to the viewers as well, is the unknown quantity of just what the father is capable of. Is he merely a cruel and heartless parent, or does he have darker ambitions? Would he kill his children? In this deeply unsettling ambiguity, The Return is the strongest depiction of, not the reality, but the feeling of life in the Soviet Union.

In one of the most powerful cinematic images in recent memory, the boys return from their catastrophic trip, dazed, brutalized and alone. As we are left to ponder what the future may hold for the brothers, a series of photographs of the trip flash onscreen. Throughout the course of The Return, Andrey is seen taking pictures, establishing their provenance. Expecting a similarly brutal series of images, we are surprised to see a set of pictures of smiling faces, happy moments and glorious landscapes-all entirely absent from the story we had just seen. This shock is not accidental-in fact, it is a pointed statement about the duplicity of the image.

"Don't believe the snapshots from our 70-year journey," Zvyagintsev is telling us. Like a metaphorical fictional adaptation of The Gulag Archipelago, The Return demands an engagement with the grubby reality of history. In the figure of Ivan, Zvyagintsev has crafted the iconic figure of the post-communist era: raging, despairing and demanding the truth. Ivan is a standing rebuke to all who shield their eyes from the horror of the communist era.