jessie’s blog

We have talked a lot in class about how Russian films have felt the need to separate themselves from Hollywood and, to a lesser extent, Western European movies.  I think in “Piter FM” they have succeeded in both.  A Hollywood romantic comedy would have had the main characters actually meet each other at some point in the actual film, and they would have fallen completely in love at the end with some sort of certain future ahead of them, and possibly even a marriage.  A Western indie film would have ended either unhappily or quietly happy, while revealing some sort of truth about the characters or human nature.  This film did neither, which is not a bad thing, but I wouldn’t claim that it is the best way to go about it either.  They all work well depending on what you’re looking for.  But I have never seen a self proclaimed romantic comedy act in the way this movie did.  Throughout the movie I kept waiting for the supposedly inevitable real-life meeting of the Masha and Maxim, and the first kiss and all of that.  When it came to the credits and this still hadn’t happened, I was surprised.  The movie had been teasing us all along with their almost-meetings and the times when they see each other on the street without knowing one another or when they come so close to running into each other, but it just never happens.  Also, in traditional romantic comedies, at least one party changes something in their life to stay with the other.  This happens on both accounts, but it isn’t really to stay with the other.  It’s more like the other helps them to realize everything that’s wrong with their life and makes them change it so that it is better and they are happier.  Also at the end there seems to be an implication that they will eventually get together, but it isn’t totally for certain.  There is a possibility that they could just keep missing each other or that they might meet but nothing will come of it.  At the same time, in contradiction to the regular indie films, there isn’t really any deep realization about humanity or anything.  It just sort of is.

To me it seems difficult to compare the characters from Prisoner of the Caucasus and Alive!, because Prisoner is about soldiers in the midst of war, while Alive! is about a soldier after the war.  Both portray the war negatively, as having a very bad effect on pretty much everyone involved, but the soldiers themselves are different.  Kir could be what Vanya will become when he gets home, although it seems unlikely since he didn’t serve as much in the war as Kir did.  Vanya never gets as accustomed to war as Kir does.  It seems as though you need to be in much more traumatic battles to develop PTSD than Vanya was in.

The ending of this move really confused me.  All of a sudden, referencing earlier in the movie, Kir gets hit by a car, or possibly a truck, and he dies.  Then he suddenly has a gravestone alongside his friends from the war, which the priest is chanting over.  The priest wouldn’t have had any reason to go there except after Kir took him, so he couldn’t have already been dead, but the priest didn’t seem to be surprised that there was another gravestone suddenly in the ground.  I guess what it was trying to say is that it was like Kir was already dead when he got back from the war, which is why the people he seemed to connect most with were the ghosts of his fellow soldiers killed in battle at the same time as he was injured.  It seemed strange that he would connect so well with them when it was implied that they weren’t really well-aquainted when they actually knew each other in real life.  I think what they were trying to imply was that he was buried in spirit ever since he lost his leg.

The thing that bothered me the most about this movie is that it seems to skip around the possibility that his mother will not want him and will send him back to the orphanage.  The more responsible of the older girls at the orphanage tells Vania that parents never come back wanting their children, and Kolian tells him that he went back to find his parents and they rejected him, but Vania never has a problem ignoring any of this in his quest.  This makes us anxious about what he is trying to do and we hope that he will be able to find his mother and that she will take him in, but the actual likelihood that that will happen is very slim.  There is a lot of build-up to the end of this movie, but when we actually find the mother, all we get is a voice and the assumption that he will be accepted.  We don’t hear any of the surprise and doubt that would certainly come once the situation was explained to the mother.  It leaves the audience with a sort of “That’s it?” attitude.  I just think that the movie could be expanded.

I’m not really sure if I would call this movie a “Russian” movie or not.  It seems to me that it is hard to define what movies made in Russia are “Russian” movies and which ones are “Hollywood” or “European” movies, because it seems that the Russian are trying to redevelop what the definition of “Russian” is when it comes to films.  The movie industry has changed drastically since the heyday of Russian film, and it seems as though Russia is trying to catch up and be different at the same time.But anyway, the most Russian thing I can come up with about this movie is that it has a rather abrupt, and somewhat unhappy ending.  A Hollywood movie would not have ended with the boy suddenly choosing dark.  He either would have chosen light or been completely confused, allowing them to make numerous sequels.Probably this also has Russian fairy tale themes, but I don’t know too much about that.Other than that, I think that it was fairly Hollywood, with the car doing tricks to get places and all the special effects and the twist at the end when we find out that the girl has cursed herself. 

Near the end of the film Boris asks if there is life on Mars.  Well, of course in the town of Mars there are people who are physically alive and all that, but I think you can define the word “living” differently for this context.  If “living” means doing something, attempting to make your life better in some way, then no one in the town is actually living.  It seems as though everyone there has developed a routine which they never break.  Everyone is stuck somewhere, too afraid to get out.  Some have dreams that they never act upon, others are just unhappy, but cannot imagine giving up their lifestyle.  They live this way until Boris arrives.  It seems strange that Boris should change their lives when he really doesn’t do much at all in the town.  However, he is different than everyone else there because he is trying to change the direction of his life.  Ironically, at the end of the film he is the only one who has not changed.  He is back at being a boxer, and he still loses and he is still unhappy.  However, those that did manage to change their lives are not necessarily happy, or even happier, even though they tell themselves they are.  Others who managed to change just died, like Greta and Nadya’s grandparents, even though they could have changed for the better.  Of course, a lot of the endings we don’t know are real.  Since Grisha is the one who narrates the ending, and he says that he married Greta, it could be that none of them changed and that in fact everyone just stayed the same.  Then again, he could just be making up the part about him and Greta, because he wants to include himself in the list of people who have changed, when in fact he hasn’t, because he still dreams about Greta.

I know this is what I talked about in class, but I would have written my blog post on it had I put my blog post up earlier, so I’m going to talk about it here, too.Arlene suggested to us that the movie could have been titled “The Prodigal” instead of “The Return.”  I like this title because it makes it much easier to think about the people and the relationships in the film more in depth.  For instance with the title “The Return,” we automatically apply that to the father, who has returned to his family after years of absence.  But when we change it to “The Prodigal,” it becomes unclear who the title is referring to.  It could certainly apply to the returning father, who, as we saw, brings up a lot of Christian symbolism, but then again the word “prodigal” is almost always used in conjunction with the word “son.”  Since neither the father’s father or any of his siblings ever come in to the story, it seems odd to think of the father as a son, especially in terms of his return.  Accordingly, we turn our attention to the two boys.  It is safe to say, I think, that the prodigal cannot be referring to Andrei, as he never has a falling out with his father or brother.  So we look at Ivan, who fits the bill much better.  And, indeed, in the original Bible story the prodigal son was the youngest.  Of course, Ivan never physically leaves his father and brother while they are on their trip, but in a psychological way he does.  He doesn’t want to accept his father for his actual father, asserting his independence much like the youngest son in the Bible story, and he becomes mad at Andrei for accepting their father so readily.  Unfortunately for both Ivan and the father, the turning point in his affection comes not after something so small as losing all his money, but rather only after the father dies on Ivan’s behalf and Ivan feels guilty for everything he did.  Only then can he return to his father’s affections as the son in the story did, but Ivan’s father is dead.  The story of the prodigal becomes much more powerful with the death of the father. 

As far as specific scenes go, I thought that the one near the end when Anni was trying to bring Veikko back to life didn’t fit very well with the rest of the movie.  I liked that scene by itself, but in the context of the movie it seemed too surreal.  The movie was, for the most part, trying to look like it is actually depicting what would be going on, how these people would react to things, and the situation in which Anni lived and the amount of work she had to do by herself.  I’m sure that had this actually happened, the woman would have tried to bring him back from the “land of the dead,” but the parts that show Veikko there seem to be the director or the screenwriter’s view of the land of the dead, not what Anni would be imagining, which would make more sense in this context.  If you are trying to be realistic in general, then you must keep to thngs that actually happen and things that happen the way people who are conscious imagine them, and not show things that are merely interpretations that the director or whoever thought up of a particular situation.

On a completely different note, I think it would be interesting to see this from the point of view of one of the characters at a time, in order to connect more deeply with each of them and understand their situations.  Someone should make an option on the DVD to only watch with subtitles that only happen when someone speaks in Russian, and then that only happen when someone speaks in Finnish, and then that only happen when someone speaks in Sami.  That would be really interesting and would show the viewers what it would feel like to be one of them, instead of just imagining.

I really liked how they used color and sound in this movie.  Even though what was happening to the Yaya and Rita was not so great- the whole deaf/being chased by the mob/prostitution thing is not exactly an ideal situation- they were always portrayed in and usually surrounded by bright colors.  It’s designed to make us like them and respect them no matter what their decisions are, and also to represent their childish hope for the future and dream of this land of the deaf.  It lightens the mood of what would otherwise be a very depressing movie.

The use of sound was crucial to this movie, being about the deaf.  The movie starts out in complete silence, which makes us wonder if Rita and Alyosha are going to be the deaf ones.  When we finally meet a deaf person, it is at first difficult to tell if she is deaf or not because she doesn’t appear to be wearing any sort of hearing aid, and she seems to know in general what people are saying.  We do detect that maybe she isn’t catching everything, though, and she talks at a louder-than-normal volume.  The other deaf people, when they talk, also have things that are off about their voices.  The movie also makes good use of the sea sound thing.  Sometimes in the middle of scenes they start playing the sea sound and you don’t even notice it.  When Rita is learning to act like she is deaf, we can hear inside her head as she practices, with the streets sounds getting softer and the ocean getting louder until we cannot hear the street at all.  Then when her concentration is broken we suddenly hear the street noises at full volume and the ocean completely disappears.  At the end, after she goes deaf from the gunshot, we only hear the sound of the sea, with absolute silence behind.  It comes as a contrast to the complete silence of the beginning, which is what most hearing people think being deaf would sound like, to what being deaf actually sounds like.

First of all, I’d like to say that this movie was very confusing, at least to me.  Apparently it is well understood by Russians, or else it wouldn’t have been such a blockbuster.  It was hard to follow all the things about who he was killing and why and who betrayed whom or if they did and which people worked for each other and liked each other or didn’t.

I thought that Bodrov was a good choice for Danila, and it made the character that much deeper and more interesting.  When we first see him, it seems as though he’s just some cocky young man who doesn’t really know what he’s doing.  He looks so innocent and even a little bit fragile, and he tends to getvery caught up with unimportant, materialistic things such as CDs.  Although he served in the war, he claims he only served as a clerk.  But later we see a very different side of him.  He is surprisingly good with guns, and is very good at planning an attack and leaving room for escape.  He is barely noticable in the crowd of people in the market when he shoots the Chechen, and, except for the people put there to watch him, no one seemed to notice he was there even after the shot. All of this indicates some prior experience with guns and killing, so he probably did actually fight in the war.

Another thing about Danila is that while sometimes he just kills with seemingly reckless abandon, he also shows moments of pity and compassion and also appears to be a man of his word.  The way he cares for Sveta seems so out of character for him, and his attempt at help for the CD shop clerk and Goffman bring us back to the more innocent view of him.  And then the way he saves some lives after uncaringly killing others is even disconcerting.

Chukhrai does an excellent job in this film of making his viewers depressed.  First of all, the two most sympathetic lead characters in the movie, Sanja and Katya, are both very attractive people, Sanja for his small child cuteness and Katya for her simple, unadorned beauty, and, as much as we’d like to think it otherwise, it is easier for an audience to like nice, attractive characters than it is for them to like nice, unattractive characters.  When bad things happen to the boy and his mother, it hurts us that much more to see them suffer.  Also a large factor in the overall tone of the film is the setting.  Except for the one scene in the upper class resort area, all the action takes place in cold, overcast places inhabited by poor, unhealthy people living in dank, rotting, pest-infested group homes or crowded trains.  These two factors set the scene in order to instill a sadness in the audience that does not leave as soon as we enter back into the sun, but rather creates an emptiness and lack of hope in its viewers.

The plot, of course, also has a lot to do with the overall sadness of the film.  To see a young boy and his struggling mother try to make it on their own while the boy is having serious abandonment issues and hallucinations of his father is bad enough, but when you add in this man whom the boy idolizes, but is not exactly the best role model, it’s just hard to take.  As scene after scene goes by in which the boy willingly learns the violent and morally confused lessons Toljan teaches him, the only reason we are able to forgive Toljan and hope for a better future is because we think that maybe he really cares about these two poor people who depend and look up to him so much.  We hope that at the end he will come back to find Sanja and take him in as a son.  When he doesn’t and instead at first doesn’t remember Sanja and then makes jokes trivializing this boy’s entire life, our hope collapses and we feel as betrayed as Sanja.  The difference is that we probably would just let him leave.  But Sanja, who was raised by this man to be violent, takes Toljan’s own gun, in both the literal and the figurative sense, and kills him with it.