The Cannes film festival, the world’s top cinema showcase, has rolled away its red carpet on May 23. For the first time, Ukraine wriggled through the Cannes doors in France and proudly took a seat in the main program of the festival, which featured 19 films.
Albeit failing to collect any honors, director Serhiy Loznitsa made Ukraine’s debut happen with his film “My Joy.”
The triumph of national honor is not that clean or clear, however.
First of all, the film was about Russia.
And secondly, the director has a diffused connection to Ukraine, even though that’s the country he claimed for his entry.
Besides, the title “My Joy” was bestowed on the original script, which was about love. Through editing, it somehow mutated into the fatal story of murders, police brutality and the vile side of the human nature.
The two-hour long film tells a story of a truck driver traveling through Russia’s backwoods. After an eerie start when a person is being dumped in a pit and buried in mud, we are off to meet Georgy. He is setting off on a fateful trip with a load of flour in his lorry.
To the howling of Russian chanson, he’s passing through forsaken industrial landscapes until he’s stopped by police. While officers get busy with a blonde from a red convertible, Georgy finds a moment to slip out from their kennel. Why a woman from a cabriolet – a sign of ridiculous wealth in Eastern Europe – goes down to unambiguous giggling in a stinking room on the highway left me wondering. It was just the beginning though, and a warning of a massive black hole to unfold later.
“Old man, you are delirious,” said Georgy, finding an odd wrinkled man in his truck when he escapes the cops. This feeling of stranded confusion and often despair from shocking acquaintances resonates through the rest of the film.
Loznitsa went for a complex plot, knitting a collection of stories from different time periods together. They are strung together around the driver, as well as fatalism, brutality and the opposite of everything humane. He kills every sprout of kindness at the root.
When a soldier at the end of the Second World War returns from Berlin, he hooks up with another man in a greatcoat. But after a friendly evening, the latter robs his guest of a red dress the soldier prepared for his fiance. A bullet puts an end to this short, and brings the driver back onscreen.
Georgy is stuck in a huge traffic jam. He picks up a prostitute and offers her food and money without wanting sex. “What are you, some kind of fool? Noble? Decided to pity a little girl?” lashed out the underage hooker. In Loznitsa’s vision of remote Russia, no one wants or deserves compassion.
“I wanted to shoot a film about love,” said Loznitsa in the interview after the premiere. “But as it usually happens with Russians, whatever you start doing, it all ends with Kalashnikov guns.”
And so the shadows of his past encounters with rural homosapiens crept from his memory on screen. His film is based on true story, he said, at least for the most part.
Born in Belarus, raised in Ukraine and educated in Russia, Loznitsa immigrated to Germany in 2001. A mathematician in his mind and by his first diploma, he found his second calling in Moscow Institute of Cinematography. Russia provided plenty of foul play to burn with sensation in his documentaries.
On screen, Loznitsa portrays rural Russia as a doomed place where roads lead nowhere, and where neighbors offer to make a coffin before the person’s dead. Teachers in his “Joy” love teaching children, not murdering people, but get killed for those progressive mindsets.
“The system of roads in Russia is built in the shape of a tree. Big cities lead to small villages, from which the only way out is back to the center,” he said. “It reflects the [Russian] mentality. There is a center and many small dots connected to it through one road. It means there’s just one hierarchy, just one truth, and everything else is secondary,” pondered the filmmaker.
Film magazine Screen called it “an intriguing but often messily impenetrable dramatic debut… It’s hard to imagine that many viewers will consider their patience sufficiently rewarded.”
Watching Ukraine’s entry for Cannes, another award-winning film sprang to mind, this time a documentary. “English Surgeon” is a story about a British doctor who comes to Ukraine and encounters a no lesser amount of trouble and despair in villages than perhaps Loznitsa did in his time.
But while people in “My Joy” suffer from the hands of sadistic cops, in the “Surgeon,” they are haunted by brain tumors. The foreign surgeon, albeit failing in some of his operations, plants a belief that one man can change things, even if he’s on his own. Even if the setting is the former U.S.S.R.
“My Joy” is a one-sided story of life in post-Soviet space. Even worse, it makes the viewer feel guilty for enjoying the sun before entering the darkness of the cinema hall.
“A single artist cannot present all the points of view at the same time,” Loznitsa said, to justify the unremitting bleakness of his film.
The title “My Joy” seems to be a self-deprecating irony of Loznitsa’s attempt to make a soulful feature caught in the webs of a soulless reality.
Fortissimo Films has already snapped up worldwide rights to the film, thinking something special is afoot. It’s sad to think, however, that “special” these days means sadistic and fatal.
Kyiv Post staff writer Yuliya Popova can be reached at [email protected].
