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The Return

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"The Return," a breathtakingly austere masterpiece from the land that gave us Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Tarkovsky, is one of the most beautifully acted and directed films I have seen in years. Astonishingly enough, this is the feature film debut for director Andrei Zvyagintsev who demonstrates more of a mastery and command of the medium in this his maiden effort than most directors do in a whole body of work.

The film tells the tale of two brothers, Ivan and Andrei, who live with their mother and grandmother in a small coastal village in Russia. One day, totally unexpectedly, the boys' father returns after a twelve-year absence. In an effort to make up for lost time, the dad decides to take his sons on a fishing trip, but, almost immediately, he begins to demonstrate disturbing tendencies towards domination and abuse. He also appears to be up to some sort of nefarious business operations to which neither we nor the boys are entirely privy.

Every single moment of this film is a revelation. Zvyagintsev beautifully captures the opposite ways in which the boys react to and interact with their father. Andrei, the oldest, is so desperate for a father figure in his life that he is willing to overlook the often inexplicable, bizarre and possibly even dangerous behavior that this particular father exhibits. Ivan, on the other hand, embittered by years of absence and neglect, seethes with barely disguised rage at the man who now presumes to enter into their once happy lives and assert his authority. Of the two boys, he seems the most tuned into the kind of threat the father may pose to their welfare. Yet, towards the end of the story, the apparently latent love the boy feels for this man as his father does eventually rise to the surface. Through this intense interaction, the film emerges as a complex and profound study of what father and son relationships are really all about.

It is virtually impossible to put into words just how brilliantly the two young actors use their facial expressions to convey a wealth of meaning and emotion. As portrayed by Vladimir Garin, Andrey looks up to his father with a mixture of boyish pride and trembling awe, longing for the kind of male affirmation he has been deprived of all these years. He is desperate to please his father by proving to him that he can perform the acts of manhood that his dad keeps putting forth for him to do. As Ivan, Ivan Dobronravov spends most of his time glaring at the man, his mouth pursed in a tight unyielding grimace of resentment and hate. If I could give an award for the best performance by a child actor in movie history, these two youngsters would be high on my list of candidates. They are that amazing. Tragically, young Garin drowned two months prior to the release of the film, leaving his indelible mark behind in a performance that will never be forgotten by anyone privileged enough to witness it. Konstantin Lavronenko is equally impressive as the boy's mysterious father, beautifully underplaying the part of a man who can appear sane and rational on the surface but who is a seething cauldron of untapped emotions beneath. In fact, it is this constant threat of violence always on the verge of eruption that keeps us off balance and on edge throughout the entire picture.

The film's writers, Vladimir Moiseyenko and Aleksandr Novotosky, deserve special recognition for not allowing the plot to overwhelm the characters. For this is, first and foremost, a great character study. The scenarists have intentionally left the background of the father vague and sketchy, the better to enhance the sense of mystery and danger he represents. We never find out what nefarious activities he is involved with since that is of virtually no importance either to the children or to us. We are too engrossed in the relationships of the characters to care. In fact, there are a few hints towards the end of the film that this seemingly cold, uncaring man, for all his myriad faults, might actually just love his sons in his own strange way. The film leaves us with no easy answers or pat resolutions at the end. And this is how it should be. In fact, the scriptwriters even throw a few of Hitchcock's prized "MacGuffins" into the mix to keep us off balance (there is a scene in which some possibly stolen money sinks to the bottom of a lake that is highly reminiscent of what happens in "Psycho")..

Among other things, "The Return" represents one of the most impressive directorial debuts since Francois Truffaut`s "The 400 Blows." Zvyagintsev's ability to draw great performances from his actors is only one of his many talents on display here. His lyrical use of composition, as well as the way in which he makes nature and weather an integral part of his drama help to draw us so deeply into this world that it takes the viewer literally hours to get fully back to his own existence again once the movie has ended. It reverberates for days afterwards. For as with any great film, "The Return" finds its way into the depths of one's soul and leaves the viewer a richer person for the experience.

Winner of the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival (2003), "The Return" is a true work of art and one of the outstanding films of the decade so far. Whatever you do, don't miss this film.

There is something about this movie that sticks with you long after you have watched it. Is it the way the story starts? The way it ends? The way your primary expectations are not met, and yet you find something else that you didn't expect? Hard to say, but it eventually matters very little. You are moved, you are disturbed, and you keep thinking about it... It beats those blockbusters that you forgot five minutes after you stepped out of the movie theater by a long shot.
I personally love movies where I am unable to predict anything. How refreshing and disturbing!
It is a movie made by a Russian director, with outstanding Russian actors (the kids!), but there's nothing "Russian" about the story. It is a "universal" story of a father returning to his wife and children after a twelve-year unexplained absence and taking his two sons - to whom he is a perfect stranger since he left when they were very little - on a fishing trip.
From then on, "unexpected" is the guideline and you hold your breath. What is going to be revealed? What is going to happen? How will the three characters deal with their new relationship?
You'll have to watch to find out...
The photography is beautiful, and the score at times adds real power to the images.
A must-see movie for cinema buffs, not for the average "movie goer".

"The Return" is one of the best movies to have recently come out of Russia. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev, who has been compared to Tarkovsky by quite a few critics, does a wonderful job, and so do the three main actors Konstantin Lavronenko (the father) and Vladimir Garin and Ivan Dobronravov (as Andrey and Vanya, the sons).

The movie opens with the two brothers running. They play on the windy lakeshore with their friends, jumping off a tower into the dark water. The younger boy is too scared to jump, but too reluctant to climb down for fear of being branded a chicken. When his worried mom ultimately finds him, he declares that he would have died up there if she hadn't. Life flows by as usual. It changes when the brothers come back home one day and their mom whispers to them, "Be quiet, your father is sleeping". Their father (with suggested links to the Russian mafia) had not been home in the last twelve years and their only recollections about him are from an old black and white photograph. He plans a weeklong fishing trip with the kids to get to know them again. He is a stranger to them, and in contrast to their mother, is someone who doesn't tolerate childhood tantrums and sulking and wants them to grow up and learn to deal with life the hard way. The younger boy has a miserable time, while the elder one is torn between suspicion and the desire to bond with his father. They eventually start out for an island and when the boat's motor splutters and stops, their dad makes them row. Exhausted, they reach the island ... it is here under the grey skies that the story reaches its unexpected climax.

Throughout the movie the atmosphere is gloomy and the dialogue is sparse. The movie was shot in the Siberian pine forests near the border of Russia and Finland, and the overcast sky and the drizzle work to complement the sombre moods of the characters. A lot of what the audience carries away from the movie are only suggested and never explicitly mentioned. At the end of it, we realize that we know hardly anything about the characters that we had been following for the past 105 minutes other than watching their emotions at play. All these work together to transform this thriller into an unsettling psychological study seeped in Russian mysticism.

Imagine Bergman with a touch of Hitchcock or Chabrol. In this award-winning film about a father and two young sons on a fishing trip after twelve years of separation, there is the bleakness and moral ambiguity of Bergman's world, where people live isolated lives, often on remote islands. Meanwhile, there's the creepy uncertainty that permeates the works of the masters of suspense. In its stark focus on three characters traveling alone together, it's also reminiscent of Polanski's early film, "Knife in the Water."

Visually the film is striking with its slow but persistent camera movement and the washed out color that reduces some scenes to monochrome. Meanwhile, the soundtrack music is spare and eerie. Most striking of all are the performances, as the taciturn and vaguely malevolent father interacts in unexpected ways with the two boys, who regard him with varying degrees of trust and distrust.

At some level, it's a film about fathers and sons and the distance between them as the immaturity, emotions, fears and physical weakness of boys are confronted by the uncompromising expectations of hardened adult males, who have shed any vestige of their own boyhoods as something to be scorned. And we keep watching the man for signs of his true character as he responds to the two boys, one of them willing to accept the man at his word, the other deeply suspicious and openly rebellious.

Based on a simple premise, it's a brilliantly conceived story that holds the viewer to the end, leaving us finally with unanswered questions that provoke reflection on the loss of innocence and the uneasy relationship between family and self. The DVD includes a one-hour making-of documentary that reveals many of the challenges of directing and shooting the film. Not least interesting is its commentary on working with the film's young actors.

Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2003 debut, 'Vozvrashcheniye' ('The Return') throws into sharp contrast much of the dreck that has come out of Hollywood for 200 times the cost of Zvyagintsev's reported $500,000 budget. This is an incredible film with layer upon layer of meaning and interpretation. The writers, the cinematographer and director demonstrate nothing short of genius here.

It's tough to even begin to talk about the movie without revealing too much. A father - gone for 12 years - returns. Prison? Mafia? These are the prosaic reasons my wife and I came up with. A 63-minute documentatary on the DVD gives you some insight into the shoot, the funding, how the project came together, etc. But the essence of the film itself - the script, the story concept, its staging - remains inscrutable and opaque. But after seeing the viewer commentary posted on IMDB, I realized that my understanding of the film had only scratched the surface...there are overtly religious overtones at play here (including one spot-on restaging of Andrea Mantegna's "The Dead Christ"), some possible commentary about the last days of Communism vs. the 'new' Russia, and one further interpretation about the brothers and their diary that completely turned the movie on its head and - upon further review and thinking - I now see as a brilliant revelation. Again: it's genius that Zvyagintsev and crew have layered all this in and have us all talking and interpreting and re-thinking.

I had come here with the intention of waxing poetic about the acting skills of 'younger son' Ivan, as played masterfully by Ivan Dobronravov. But nothing I say is going to top the previous reviewer's comment that he makes Haley Joel Osmont (in 'The Sixth Sense') look like the red-headed kid from Different Strokes. Now, that's a brilliant way to state it. Touché, sir!

Tragically, this will be Vladimir Garin's (elder son Andrey) only film. He drowned shortly after the filming completed and before the movie hit the big screen in art houses here in mid-2004. He wasn't as strong an actor as young Dobronravov, but towards the end of the film, you can feel him gaining confidence. The filmmakers even make note of the fact that by the end Garin was leading them. A real tragedy.

I had recently been wondering about the foreign independent films and this particular film had caught my eye. My interest started after watching many other American films, but I savoured for a different perspective in story telling and filmmaking. The Houston Museum of Fine Art's Film Theatre was the place to go to watch the tonight's last premiere of the film; I was determined to watch it and invited my friends.

The Return Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev
Film review by Monserrat Martinez
September 5, 2004

The film opens with young Russian boys daring each other to jump off the tower into the cold lake. The last of the boys decided not to jump and is left alone by his brother and calls him "chicken".
The two fatherless brothers from a Russian town, Andrei (Vladimir Garin) and Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov), are engaged in a brotherly fight the next day and chase after each other to tell their mother. They then learn of their father's (Konstantin Lavronenko) sudden return home after twelve years.
The mysterious father takes his sons to a fishing trip and their mother reluctantly accepts them to go with their father. Andrei, the oldest, is willing to please his father and dearly calls him "papa" while Vanya, the youngest and most stubborn, resents his father's return. The trip engages in different confrontations between the father and his sons as well as between the brothers. We learn of Andrei's weakness in peer pressure and Vanya's rebel character. The viewer's immediately recognize the father's strong character and violent punishments, but a "godlike" figure to the boys. Andrei says to his brother "did you see him. He is big, he probably works out" during their last night before leaving for the trip.
The many confrontations between Vanya and his father conveys the "toughen up" and military background of the father and ways of punishing his rebel son Vanya - leaving him alone in the rain with the fishing rods. Later on the "favoured" son, Andrei is physically abused by banging his son's face on the car during the car trouble.
The climatic point of the film starts with Vanya's grand plan to steal his father's knife and confession to Andrei of his feelings and hatred towards their father. A disaster is bound to happen, as the day gets darker and windy. (A tragic recently happened to the young actor Vladimir Garin just after finishing the film when he had drowned in a swimming accident similar to the beginning of the film.)
Pleasing to the eye as the landscape of Russia, during the spring, blooms in the father-son trip. Visualizing the serene images of the boys' faces during the calm waters to their stern faces during the stormy weather.
Somehow Vanya's decisiveness to prove his courage by climbing up the tower and the fear in his father for his son's safety creeps an uncomfortable thrill to the viewers. The morose consequences change the young boys' character and personality.
The 39-year-old Russian director's, Mr. Zvyagintsev, creation to demonstrate the moving tension and simplicity of his characters evokes a psychological thrill. There are some biblical metaphors or inferences, but that is to judge only to the viewer's own opinion. The sacred relationship between father and son eludes the mysterious persona of the father's mission to get the box and taking his innocent sons with him arose more mystery. "The Return" completes itself as a wonderful film filled with human actions with reasonable thoughts. A new talent has arrived from this independent Russian film.

It's the first Zvyagintsev movie, and its almost perfect. Every emotions are in "The Return". The story look simple - 2 kids go to a trip with their father who's back from a very long absence - but, in this simplicity, you can find how hard it is to trust somebody we don't really know...
Give a try to this wonderful movie...my favorite for a while.

Some reviews call the film boring, plotless,
lacking message. I thought it was a very
simple, but highly imaginative plot.

At times the film moves slowly but it's a
sleeper which climaxes brilliantly and leaves
you stunned.

As for the "message", the "message" may
be lost on Americans because the film's
characters and their problems are quite
Russian.

The father is a macho, laconic, at times
physically abusive, a drinker--not your
sensitive American type father. He's
quite Russian, actually.

The boys are fatherless for 12 years until
he returns. Why was he gone and why so
casually does he return?

Possibly, he's a Russian mafia type wanted
by authorities or by the mob for a botched
deal or murder.

But the tension of the film seems to lie
in the boys' young minds: why did father
leave us? Does he love us ? Would he hurt
us ? Who is he really ? A criminal ?

This tension is what I mean by "Hitchcock
suspense".

And the very macho, laconic Russian male
figure adds to the suspense. The father
and the sons do at the end what suppressed
emotional figures tend to do in real life--
they explode with passion.

The theme of fatherless children is very
Russian when you consider that Russia
lost 25 million to the Nazi invasion. At
least two other Russian films I can think
of deal with similar issues.

If the film has any "message", it would
be that "Still Waters Run Deep". Men
are not so much lacking in emotion as
they are overwhelmed by its intensity
and unable to express it.

The boy's father is such a figure. He
seems devoid of emotion, a very macho,
seemingly uncaring.

But at the end, you find out how much
he really may have cared for his sons.
And one may suspect that it might have
been his very love for them that caused
him to go away--perhaps to spare them
the danger of being involved in his
shady dealings.

The father is redeemed at the end and
questions about his love for the boys
seem answered.

The tragedy of his character is that he
was unable to communicate well with the very
people he cared most about until it was
too late.

Brothers Andrey and Ivan go swimming with their friends and play chicken at high diving. Ivan wimps out and gets in a fight with his brother who joins their friends in mocking his cowardice. Then they go home to a bombshell. Their father is there. He hasn't been seen for 12 years and has inexplicably returned. What is more he is going to take them on a trip in his car. It's not clear quite where but fishing will, it seems, be involved. Off they go but it soon becomes clear the father-son bonding isn't really working out, especially with Ivan who is increasingly hostile and rebellious, insisting to his brother that there is something sinister and dangerous about this man. At times indeed it seems he might be right: we know nothing about this man, not even his name, never mind the identity of the person he `phones from the café or the contents of the strange box he digs up. At other times, it merely seems this is a fairly well-intentioned but awkward man with little understanding of how effectively to engage with young boys. In any case we observe rising tensions and a steadily growing sense of dread until the shocking climax where - well, I'm not such a dreadful spoilsport that I'm going to tell you.

This is youthful director Andrei Zvyganitzev's first movie. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, writers Vladimir Moiseyenko and Aleksandr Novototsky and composer Andrei Dergachyov are all also pretty new to the game. All five of them look like pretty good news for Russian cinema. Made for a tiny budget, this is a breathtakingly good movie: deep and beautiful and utterly unforgettable. Krichman's photography is phenomenal. The acting from the three leads, Konstantin Lavronenko as the taciturn and ambivalent father, and the two neophyte child actors Ivan Dobronravov as the petulant younger brother Ivan and Vladimir Garin as Andrei is consistently astonishing. (Heartbreakingly, Garin died in a swimming accident before the film was released.) It's full of scenes that could not be more perfectly realized. One that stands out for me is where Ivan, after a fight with his dad, is briefly abandoned alone on a bridge over a river. He sees a lorry approaching in the distances. It reaches him and drives past. That's all but,...wow. I grant you it certainly doesn't sound very exciting. But then neither does Omar Sharif appearing in the distance and slowly approaching Peter O'Toole across the sand sound very exciting to people who haven't seen `Lawrence of Arabia.' Just watch it: you'll see what I mean.

This is a great movie. A father returns after a twelve year unexplained absence. His two sons--who really don't know him aside from an old photograph want to go on a fishing trip. Along the way--the father reveals his darkside-still maintaining the allegiance of his elder son--but quickly turning his younger son against him. Then a deadline is set--which both sons fail to keep and the father rages against the elder son-leading to a confrontation and disaster.
While parts of this "mystery" are never explained--what was in the trunk the father dug up? Why was he missing for 12 years? Why does he refuse to eat fish? What's the cause of his "drill sergeant" like attitude towards his sons? The movie is still one of the best--remiscent of Ingmar Bergman. Beautiful photography, excellent acting, a suspenseful story and an unusual soundtrack all combine to make this dvd outstanding.
In Russian with Englsih sub-titles.