The Return (Vozvrashchenie) – Andrey Zvyagintsev – 2003

When reviewing examples of meditative cinema you often find yourself getting bound up in cliché. Not just in the terms you end up churning out (haunting/contemplative/ethereal et al) but in the reference points you turn to. Some people stand as such totemic examples of this brand of film in their national cinemas that you can’t help but consciously refer to them. Japan, you think Ozu. Sweden, you think Bergman. Iran, you think Kiarostami. Belgium, you think the Dardenne’s etc etc, and so it goes with Russian cinema, where the name Tarkovsky looms long over subsequent works.

Andrey Zvyagintsev’s debut feature The Return was as subject to this as any recent Russian feature in the wake of its Golden Lion win at 2003's Venice Festival. Critics chose to make Stalker (1979) the main frame of reference, and you can see where they were coming from. Like that picture, The Return employs a muted colour palate, where most images are drained of vibrancy to the point where every colour seems to be a variant on blue or grey, the emptied provincial towns, looking shut down in a perpetual loop of dull bank holidays, decaying warehouses creating a dystopian atmosphere echoing Stalker’s ‘The Zone’ early in the film, and of course both films are framed within a foreboding journey and discovery template. Equally valid arguments though could be made for comparing the film with other art house road trips such as Theo Angelopoulos’ Landscapes in the Mist (1988) and Michelangelo Antonioni’s stunning mist-strewn evocation of the Italian Po Delta in Il Grido (1957).

Like most films of this ilk, the outward narrative of The Return is stripped to a bare bones approach and is all the better for it. The film concerns two brothers Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov) a mummy’s boy on the cusp of adolescence and Andrey (Vladimir Garin) a few years older and determined to impress his peers. One summer day they return home to be informed that their father (Konstantin Lavronenko) unseen since they were toddlers, has returned and is intending to take them on a fishing trip to make up for lost time.

Rather than a heartfelt family reunion though, the father is met with immediate suspicion, especially by Ivan, who attempts to test his father’s patience from the off and questions his motives for returning. Not that his suspicions are completely unfounded as the father acts cold and brusque, toying emotionally with the brothers and lambasting them for perceived weaknesses in their characters.

The first half of the film takes place largely in the confines of the fathers 1980s Gaz Volga (imagine a Volvo made with Iron Curtain spit and gristle cost cutting economy rather than Swedish proficiency), and concentrates on the less ecstatic aspects of family road trips, the boredom of confinement, the monotony of unvarying landscapes and the resulting shortened tempers of those caught up in this scenario.

As the film progresses, a sense of menace and dread begins to take hold as we are invited to share in the brothers’ suspicion of the increasingly authoritarian actions of their father. By the time the trio arrive at their fishing destination on a secluded mid-lake island, this ominous atmosphere builds towards an almost inevitably crushing conclusion.

The film invites itself up as a emblematical template for varied analytical approaches, be that theological (with the father’s introduction to the film purposely framed to echo Andrea Mategna’s The Lamentation over the Dead Christ and the misty hooded crossing of a lake bringing to mind Charon ferrying souls across the River Styx), psychoanalytical (the whole parental relationship dichotomy being a field day for Freudian scholars) or allegorical (certainly native viewers may be drawn towards an analysis in which the old guard of the USSR has a traumatised relationship with contemporary Russia).

I found taking the film at face value perfectly rewarding though. The strained relationship creating a perfectly intriguing premise. I found it reminiscent of when you would visit friends whose father’s you found overly strict as a child, and you stand there witnessing these relationships wondering what their motive was, is their father a cruel man? Does he detest the responsibility of having children? Or is he simply trying to teach important lessons in a slightly misguided way? Making sure the child has the necessary attributes of a ‘man’ so that the world can’t take advantage? This is the kind of scenario played out here. The film provides a steady stream of intimations that the father has an ulterior motive for the trip (an eventual mcguffin), and gives very subtle hints as to the reasons for him being missing for 12 years, allowing the viewer to piece together their own backstory of sorts.

This was a stunningly rewarding film to view a second time. With hindsight, character motivations appear clearer and in the case of the father, more forgiving than our initial viewing of him as a stern beast of a man with the resulting actions having all the more devastating an impact as a consequence. A large part of this can be put down to Konstantin Lavronenko’s performance which is commendably nuanced behind a poker faced façade.

Unfortunately having knowledge of the film's production provides an extra sense of melancholy to its proceedings as Vladimar Garin suffered a bitterly ironic death in a drowning accident not long after completion of the film. The fact casting an inevitable weight and long shadow over the picture.

Predictably we return to Tarkovsky. His own debut Ivan’s Childhood (1962) ends up providing one of the most apt comparisons in the end. The innocence of youth cut short, the brutality of responsibility being forced onto unready young shoulders. If the responsibility of being a 21^st century Tarkovsky is to be pushed upon Zvyagintsev’s own shoulders, then with this and his subsequent work so far, he’s doing a creditable job.

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Buffalo '66 - Vincent Gallo - 1998

Warming to the work of Vincent Gallo was something I never expected to find myself succumbing to. My early knowledge of him had been shaped by his self cultivated ‘enfant terrible’ of indie film image, his various rants on the state of cinema, his cameo roles in music video’s such as Glassjaw’s “Cosmopolitan Bloodloss” and his prominent features, a Brando cool overwhelmed by loathing and cynical Lower East Side hipster rat snark.

I was surprised then when I first watched one of his self directed efforts The Brown Bunny (2003) to find a minimal, wistful, malaise led road movie, the only hints of the Gallo i’d been previously privy to, were in the notorious ending featuring his then girlfriend Chloë Sevigny, and so I was led to finally seeing his directorial debut Buffalo 66, and you know what, it’s a good film, in fact on a repeat viewing, it’s actually a pretty great film.

Gallo is Billy, released from prison after 5 years (covering for someone else’s crime because of a large gambling debt); he has somehow convinced his parents that he has been working away on a ‘top secret assignment’ for the last 5 years. Upon arrival in his home town he makes the seemingly extreme decision to kidnap a woman Layla (Christina Ricci) to pose as his wife ‘Wendy’ and complete the delusion of his parents.

The Gallo I saw here on first viewing was the detestable narcissist I had previously envisaged, it was only on a second viewing that this early part of the film began to fit within the scope of the rest of the picture for me. Gallo comes running out of the blocks full of impotent rage. The film after opening with his release from his stretch; spends the next 15 minutes upon his arrival in Buffalo, on a Kafka like futile search for an open toilet facility, an increasingly comical scenario that concludes with an odd homophobic attack/rant. This scene at first just makes us think “typical asshole Gallo” and has been much derided in reviews of the film, but on subsequent viewings I see it more as a release for all the pent up anger, fear and torment that an opening montage showed us that he suffered during his prison term.

Gallo’s hometown of Buffalo is presented as Nowhere U.S.A. A cold post-industrial dystopia, a land of permanent late winter, where the sun never shows from behind the gunmetal cloud cover and a perfectly suitable location for matching the palate of the early 70’s cinema that the fine cinematography recalls, there are echoes of the Boston of Peter Yates’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1974) and the eastern seaboard journey of Hal Ashby’s The Last Detail (1973). The city is painted as a landscape of broken dreams and beer stained dollar bills, where the local football team offer the only outlet of passion for the malcontent residents, and it’s this football team (specifically the 1966 Buffalo team of the title and a later incarnation discussed shortly) that prove pivotal in shaping Billy’s livid existence.

We finally meet Billy’s parents, perfectly embodied by Angelica Houston and Ben Gazarra (whose presence makes the viewer no doubt intentionally think of Cassavettes). Dad is a failed crooner, and a short tempered puppy killer, Mom couldn’t care less about Billy’s wellbeing, thinking only of her beloved Buffalo Bills. A well edited scene has Mom state how she wishes she’d never had Billy (due to missing a vital Super Bowl winning game) whilst the commentator of the game playing in the background states “he’ll have to live with that the rest of his life”. This 20 minute centre piece of the film helps us begin to understand Billy’s relentless rage, before meeting his parents, he hilariously makes Layla/Wendy observe his ridiculously specific demands for pleasing them, he clearly craves their approval, he craves for love, but during an increasingly ill tempered meal, the image of his ‘family’ life disintegrates.

We find that Billy’s other motivation for returning to Buffalo, has become a twisted revenge mission on a Scott Woods, the spot kicker who he blames for losing him the bet that left him in hock to the local dons, of course this bet was placed on the Buffalo Bills, the team casting a permanent shadow over his life.

Before he can get around to enacting this revenge though, he and Layla stumble through several downtrodden Buffalo locations together, the bowling alley (in which we receive a wonderful musical interlude courtesy of King Crimson, a shoestring Busby Berkeley number gone prog-rock that somehow fits with the films verisimilitude), a greasy spoon cafe, a 2 dollar photo booth, and finally a makeshift motel room, throughout these scenes Billy continues to rant, rave, demand, all whilst Wendy patiently expresses her love for him, we gradually strip away at the layers of his damage, we find out about his youthful crush on the real Wendy (embodied by Rosanna Arquette as a small town bloodsucker) and his longing to be wanted, finally he breaks, is he truly being offered the love he has never known, could he, Billy Brown actually be loved?

The finale takes us to a showdown with Scott Woods in a strip bar of the gold lamé and swinging tassels variety where Billy must decide between love or annihilation, the scene builds like a low budget Fellini bacchanal, a sweaty grand guignol of gross caricatures.  Billy draws his pistol, his decision is made...

The closing scene proves to be the one that truly won me over, Billy has made his choice and enters a doughnut shop, buzzing with the realisation he has discovered what love feels like, he has a newfound empathy, everyone is his friend, there is a powdered wide eyed rush to his speech, he is imbued with generosity, pure unfiltered happiness, the euphoric joy that comes with knowing you’ve found someone, not just someone, the one! You get me? Everyone deserves a shot at that feeling, even little asshole Billy, he’s in love and we are overwhelmed with happiness for him, what happened? End credits.

Possession - Andrzej Zulawski - 1981

If ever an argument can be made against generic pigeonholing then surely exhibit A for the prosecution would be Andrzej Zulawski’s apocalyptic horror/art-house/thriller/drama/surrealist domestic dispute picture Possession. The film is often advertised as a horror film in the vein of the European demonic possession films that were released in the wake of Bill Friedkin’s The Exorcist (1973), and one of the film’s region 1 DVD releases even sees the film unceremoniously dumped into a ‘Drive-In’ double pack with the late career Mario Bava Repulsion knock off Shock (1977). If there is one place Zulawski’s picture explicitly does not belong, it’s that ye old home of American teenage mating rituals.

The film begins with images of a decrepit late cold war era Berlin. Zulawski casts the action primarily in streets that surround that omnipresent image of government control and repression in the form of the Berlin Wall (it should be noted here that Zulawski is very much a victim of government oppression, he has, since this picture spent his career making films in France following suppression of his work in his native Poland).

We immediately find ourselves in the company of Mark (Sam Neill) who appears to work for some shady government agency, and is just returning from an extended assignment. He arrives home and is immediately caught in a domestic argument with his spouse Anna (Isabelle Adjani). With this Zulawski throws the audience immediately off kilter. The argument refers to many things we are not privy to, and tensions between the pair have clearly been building for some time, exploding before our eyes without clear exposition within the first minutes of the film, leaving the viewer confused in medias res.

For the first thirty or so minutes, the film comes across like Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) recast with mental patients. Both central performers give such extreme performances that it’s amazing that they remained stable following conclusion of the picture. Sam Neill, not a stranger to psychological horror, flits wildly between Somnambulistic calm and hysterical rage, whilst Adjani (who deservedly won the best actress award at Cannes for her performance) provides a stunning mental collapse that soon becomes deeply uncomfortable to watch. Previous to this picture my primary experience of Adjani’s work had been her ‘kooky’ turn in Polanski’s The Tenant (1976) and her purposefully muted and ethereal performances in Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) and Herzog’s remake of Nosferatu (1979), which made the impact of her performance here all the more overwhelming.

After this opening half hour, and Mark’s subsequent hiring of a private investigator to find out what his wife is up to, the film’s previous preoccupation with the breakdown of a family unit makes way for surrealism and symbolism, as it is revealed that as well as conducting an extra-marital affair with the sinister bi-sexual kung-fu loving Terrence Stamp alike Heinrich (Heinz Bennett). Anna is also shacked up in a dilapidated squat with a creature that appears like the half formed afterbirth of a H.R. Giger creation (actually created by Carlo Rambaldi, who would go on to operate ET!) . A mess of phallic tentacles and goo, could this creature be a result of Anna’s frenzied insanity? (ala Cronenberg’s 1979 divorce catharsis The Brood) And holy shit is it slowly evolving into something more human possibly? (Clive Barker was surely taking notes).

The film descends further into delirium as Anna appears to miscarry in cinema’s most disturbing subway passage scene outside of Gasper Noė’s Irreversible (2002). Bodies begin to pile up, Mark gets involved in a relationship with an idealised doppelganger of Anna, the government agency decide they need to ‘terminate’ Mark’s contract, and all the while Anna’s secret lover begins to evolve as the plot moves towards complete Armageddon.

If this all sounds like unbridled chaos, that’s because it is. Fortunately Zulawski somehow manages to keep control of proceedings and directs with the assurance of someone who truly believes in his work. The opening half of the film is played out in cramped modernist apartments that seem to be as much made up of tight corridors as rooms. Zulawski’s camera prowling round the abodes with a frenzied abandon complementing our protagonists increasingly fractured states. By the second half though, he cools and we seem to be in a Berlin more akin to the Lower East Side in the early 80’s, large old spaces crippled by a decaying ghettoisation. He then turns everything on its head and creates an action cinema pastiche to conclude proceedings. By this point it is more than evident Zulawski is one of those precious mad fuckers who laugh in the face of the ‘language’ of cinema.

Zulawski has continued a career of defying generic expectations he has gone on to subvert such areas as science fiction, the period drama and the musical. A one of a kind maverick, enter the world of Zulawski with an open mind and reap the benefits of a disturbed and fevered imagination.