'The Return'
Father's day

THE WINNER OF the grand-prize Golden Lion at last year's Venice Film Festival, and Russia's selection in the Best Foreign Language Film category of this year's Academy Awards, Andrey Zvyagintsev's The Return is the work of a majorly ambitious, and possibly major, new director. Zvyagintsev sets a simple family story – two boys reuniting with a parent who is essentially a stranger – against stark landscapes and a foreboding body of water. Though the patriarchal focus of the narrative is characteristic of current Russian cinema – Boris Khlebnikov and Alexei Popogrebsky's Koktebel (which plays this year's San Francisco International Film Festival) and Alexander Sokorov's Father and Son have similar dramatic setups – Zvyagintsev's allegory about the mysterious reappearance of a Father Russia strives for the power of myth. It also has an almost romantic undercurrent (think Roald Dahl's Danny, Champion of the World) until its sense of wonder turns ominous. Mikhail Kritchman's cinematography is one of the film's strong points – as 15-year-old Andrey (Vladimir Garin) and younger mama's boy Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov) venture into the great unknown with an intimidating paternal figure (Konstantin Lavronenko), minute shifts in the gray-blue spectrums of sea and sky seem to articulate the mostly mute characters' emotions: cold but dangerously wild. There's more than a hint of Tarkovsky to this approach, yet Zvyagintsev's sense of the inscrutable isn't so avant-garde, and Andrei Dergachyov's pulsing, clattering score suits the locked metal heart of this tale. One final, eerie note: a real-life tragedy occurred after filming, when Garin drowned near one of The Return's chief settings. (Johnny Ray Huston)