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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Duel - Steven Spielberg - 1971

Ahh 1971, a landmark year for the ‘New Hollywood’ crowd by anyone’s estimation. Billy Friedkin released his first masterwork with The French Connection, Peter Bogdanovich released what is arguably his only masterwork with The Last Picture Show, a young beardy future mega-lo-maniac made THX 1138, not to mention Altman’s McCabe & Mrs Miller, Ashby’s Harold and Maude, Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, Alan Paluka’s Klute, Richard Sarafin’s Vanishing Point..... well you get the picture. In the midst of all this, a young California State dropout was stuck doing episodes of Night Gallery and low budget TV movies. Given a project to direct a quickie adaptation of a Richard Matheson short story out in the California desert, the youngster just happened to create a genre masterpiece, and the breakout that would soon make him the world’s most bankable director. This of course was Steven Spielberg, and the little TV Movie in question Duel.

This is hardly an early example of the Spielberg we know and erm... love? today though. Duel is instead a film with such a studied minimalist framework and structure that I feel you can comfortably place it alongside the more radical studio funded works of the period, such as the aforementioned Two Lane Blacktop.

The plot can be described within the briefest of synopses, a white collar salesman named David Mann (Dennis Weaver), is driving across southern-eastern California when he suddenly finds himself terrorised by the unseen driver of a large tanker truck. After initially toying with Mann, the truck driver begins to attempt to kill him, forcing Mann to have to eventually fight back.

This barebones approach to the plot is complemented by Spielberg’s minimal usage of dialogue, which finds itself trimmed down to exclamations of disbelief from Mann together with the occasional (and somewhat unnecessary) inner monologue. The soundtrack is equally minimalist, largely making use of the diegetic, such as the truck’s roaring diesel engine and the asinine radio talkshows that emit from Mann’s car stereo.

Whilst Spielberg himself refers to the film as a simple chase picture and nothing more, the framework allows us to place our own subtexts onto the film. Certainly European critics of the time (upon seeing the extended 90 minute theatrical European release) saw the film as variously an ‘indictment of machines’, or a film of ‘Father’s failing and women taking control’. Most famously some critics read the film as a battle of the ‘middle-class bourgeoisie vs. the working classes’. This is the thesis with which my own view of the film aligns most closely.

I personally read the film along the lines of the other road movies being made by youthful directors of the period, films which were consumed by a sense of displacement, disillusionment, and anger. I see Duel as channelling this countercultural anger into a pointed attack on the white collar Middle American bourgeois. Where most of the other road movies of this period, despite their generally downbeat tone, still managed to exude a certain romanticism towards the freedoms of the open road. Duel instead sees the road as a purely hostile and dangerous place.

The film’s protagonist ‘David Mann’ can be seen as a stereotypical symbol of mid-scale corporate America. An everyman salesperson under pressure to meet targets, white collar, conventional tie, driving one of the best selling 4 door family saloons of the period in the form of the staidly designed Plymouth Valiant, and with a malcontent wife and two children at home in a detached house on a quiet suburban street. Weaver brilliantly embodies Mann as stuffy, uptight, a heart-attack waiting to happen and nothing if not emblematic of the revised ‘American Dream’ that the good capitalist American of the 1960s should aspire to.

If we see our protagonist as a symbol of white collar America, our antagonist, the unseen driver of the grime ridden, seemingly unstoppable juggernaut that terrorises him, can be seen as a twisted descendent of the pioneer spirit. A primal road man whose unwillingness to conform to societal values, can be seen as the corrupted offspring of Tom Joad back for revenge on a system that denied his own American Dream.

If the counterculture had taken a certain satisfaction in ironically embracing symbols of the American pioneer spirit (for example, Billy & Wyatt in Easy Rider (1969)), as defenders of the right to a spiritual freedom oppressed by modern American attitudes. Then Spielberg appears to take pleasure in turning this in its head. The displaced wanderer of the American highways is now the aggressor and oppressor, with Mann now the victim in what has been quoted as “a Kafkaesque world in which seemingly random and inescapable acts of psychological torture flourish and thrive”.

Spielberg emphasises the towering presence of the truck roaring up to Mann’s rear bumper with intimidating close-ups. Something we notice at these times is that the trucker’s front bumper is covered in licence plates from other states across the country, displayed like proud trophies from his previous victories. This destroyer of conservative normalcy and decency is gradually swallowing up the nation, picking it off state by state.

So if we can see the truck as a symbol of bourgeois fear, we can take this further and consider Spielberg’s own suggestion that, rather than Mann being scared of the trucker attacking him, it is more a fear of loss of control. This proves for the most interesting reading of the film on a contextual level. This is a Middle America scared of losing control of the stability and prosperity it had enjoyed since the economic boom of the 1950s. American conservative values were being challenged by the counterculture, political dichotomies seemingly dividing the nation in two.

Spielberg refuses to provide any comfort for Middle America, and so the film concludes with Mann having to resort to his own sense of primal instinct, a complete ‘loss of control’ of his own restrained conservative demeanour, he can only attempt to guarantee his survival by ridding himself of his white collar symbol (his car) in order to defend against his aggressor. Spielberg suggests that Mann has had to resort to the mindset of his adversary in order to survive, resulting as Ryan Gibley has stated in the "crumpled defeat of the middle-American male".

Oh yeah, the film’s a bloody exciting thrill ride too...

Detour - Edgar G. Ulmer - 1945

When we think of the locations in which the classics of film noir were set, usually a combination of stygian back alleys and pernicious drinking dens come to mind as our gumshoe protagonist finds himself way out of his depth in a city of hard knocks. The genre did though create a small niche in its appropriation of the road movie, changing the highways of the United States from a never ending vista of self discovery to a place of fateful self-destruction. The roots of this sub-genre can be seen in the likes of Fritz Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937), a tale of an ex-convict on the run for a murder he did not commit, and Raoul Walsh’s Bogie starring trucker flick They Drive by Night (1940). Today though, the most renowned cult classic of this period is a $30,000 poverty row quickie that goes by the name of Detour.

Despite its impoverished birth, the film is not without the previous form to suggest that it may be worthwhile, namely émigré director Edgar G. Ulmer. Though by this point he had been reduced to knocking out ‘made in a week’ b-movie fodder, Ulmer had wandered the hallowed hallways of UFA during the 1920’s, adding his production design talents to such classics as Der Golem (1920), The Last Laugh (1924) and Metropolis (1927) before joining the Diaspora of German talent that headed for Hollywood following the election of the National Socialists. In Hollywood he most famously brought his expressionist talents to the direction of the Lugosi/Karloff picture The Black Cat (1934) before gradually falling out of favour with the major studios.

His talent for the hallucinatory atmospheres of expressionism are still in evidence even here in the story of downtrodden New York dive bar pianist Al Roberts (A permanently perspiring Tom Neal looking not unlike Michael Rooker’s Henry). Roberts becomes disconsolate when the singer in his bar (and his ‘gal’) Sue (a barely used Claudia Drake) decides to leave New York and take the much clichéd stab at fame in Hollywood. Roberts soon decides to follow her, but must make his way across the country by thumbing rides. Once he reaches Arizona, Roberts, whose existence has become increasingly transient, thinks that he has finally found some luck when Charles Haskell (Edmund MacDonald) a shady pill popping bookie in a sleek convertible offers him food and a ride all the way to Los Angeles. His luck is soon out again though when Haskell appears to have a heart attack and upon trying to help him, Roberts becomes convinced that he may have inadvertently caused his death. Fearing police reprisals Roberts decides to hide the body and assume Haskell’s identity until he arrives in LA.

This plan appears to work out until he foolishly picks up a hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage, an apt name for a hellcat performance). Vera acts standoffish with Roberts and soon drops the killer line “What did you do with the body?” Vera it transpires had earlier ridden with Haskell and is well aware she is now in the car of a dead man, and so becomes Roberts bête noire, as she makes increasingly ludicrous demands of him in order to secure her silence. The film soon decamps in a Los Angeles of cheap motel rooms and car lots, with Vera thundering around the screen like a fireball hurtling towards the sun, as the film heads towards its bleak denouement.

The film clearly provides an intriguing premise, but the most interesting aspect is Roberts, who as our first person narrator comes across as untrustworthy. His story comes across as the increasingly subjective ravings of a possible madman. This is a guy who despite playing in dive bars, has a David Helfgott like talent for the piano. A man whose girlfriend leaves him to find fame, but then agrees to his on a whim decision of marriage. As his bad luck story continues, Roberts is almost pleading with the audience to believe his increasingly farfetched tale.

Set with knocking out 68 minutes of main feature seat warming fodder, Ulmer somehow created an embittered slice of classic noir, a world where everyone is on the make. Where the only person we are meant to trust may just be the loosest nut of the lot of them.

It seems that this film is now public domain and can be watched or downloaded for your viewing pleasure here http://www.archive.org/details/Detour, completely gratis! You now have no excuses not to check this king amongst b-movies out.

Radio On - Christopher Petit - 1979

I like to simplify Chris Petit’s debut down to the ‘high concept’ pitch of “Get Carter as envisioned by an early 70’s Wim Wenders”. But this of course would be selling this classic understated post punk road movie short.

The film follows Robert (David Beames), a late night factory DJ in London, who after we have followed him listlessly attending to his daily routine for a while, is informed that his brother has died mysteriously in Bristol. Robert therefore decides to take a road trip to Bristol to deal with any matters that may need clearing up.

Rather than the embrace of the road as a site of freedom and mobility as seen in the American road movie, (even the existentialist malaise ridden classic that is Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop (1971) had a free spirit and the excitement of the never ending highway). Radio On is a distinctly British take on the genre, this is a place where the road will soon come to an end, the endless horizons replaced with concrete wastelands (echoes of J.G. Ballard are numerous and clearly intentional) and utilitarian motorways. Even when our protagonist reaches the countryside he faces an unwelcoming hibernal bleakness still stuck sometime in the mid 1950’s. this is On the Road as written by Orwell instead of Kerouac.

The car as well as being symbolic of the freedom of the open road can just as easily be turned inward into an examination of alienation, the car as an autonomous unit, a metallic lump of detachment, who needs to communicate anymore when we have our own private space in which to hide even when travelling?

And so this struggle to communicate becomes the films central metaphor. The film’s opening scenes present a dystopian London crumbling under the weight of government mismanagement. Our protagonist attending to his job as a factory DJ, alone in his booth playing music to uninterested factory workers, non-descript in their identical white overalls. It’s in image of alienation as potent as anything seen in Antonioni’s work.

The theme continues throughout, our protagonist making diminutive attempts to connect with other equally displaced characters on his journey. An Army deserter, a German woman looking for her daughter and even a young Sting as an obsessive Eddie Cochran fan living out of a caravan in a desolate petrol station.

The central narrative of the dead brother in the end proves to be somewhat of an enigmatic macguffin, an incidental event to allow the narrative to propel forwards. Though the narrative appears to matter little if at all to Petit, who instead concentrates the film’s energies on a veneration of the image and the soundtrack.

His mise-en-scene of a pre-Thatcherite Britain in post industrial decline (filmed in startling high contrast by Wenders regular cinematographer of the time, Martin Schafer) is backed by a Teutonic futurist soundtrack of Kraftwerk and Berlin era Bowie. Even that ode to youthful rebellion that is “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” is presented in a disjointed and fractured way by virtue of its Devo cover version, draining away any hint of youthful abandonment.

Petit doesn’t appear to select the songs for their suitability within the image, if anything it seems to be the other way round. The images are an excuse for the songs, which are often presented in their full versions. For example check out the audacity of him having Robert sit virtually motionless in a pub for three minutes just so we can hear all of Wreckless Eric’s touching punk by way of 50’s teen bop romancer that is “Whole Wide World” on the jukebox. Hell, even the film’s title is taken from a Modern Lovers lyric.

Overall then, a magnificent film for the worshiper of the image as god, aesthetically this is an exceptional film and about as close to a real ‘road movie’ as British cinema can get. It will surely find favour with fans of Antonioni, Two Lane Blacktop and early Wenders.