In the most dense and concentrated manner imaginable, the Russian director Andrej Swaginzew tells the story of the battle between authority and rebellion, of the conflict between a father and his two sons. The film that has been awarded several prices – among others two Golden Lions in Venice, for the best debut and the best film respectively, and the John Templeton European Film of the Year Award 2003 (awarded by the churches) – is now shown in German cinemas. “The Return” is also Film of the Month (April 2004), chosen by the Protestant film jury.
Axe in hand, the father stands above his older son who has fallen into the sand, the younger one, knife drawn, angry and out of his mind, threatens to kill the father. A disastrous circle seems to come to its close, a circle whose beginning is an image in an illustrated bible: Abraham ready to sacrifice Isaac. Between the pages of the dusty volume, Iwan – about twelve years old – and Andrej – already bearing signs of puberty – have been looking for a childhood photograph in the attic, an evidence that the sleeping stranger is the returned father. A white feather has swayingly come to rest on the sleeper’s pillow. It floats directly from Tarkowskij’s “Nostalghia” where an absent father is represented by his poetry into Swaginzew’s film. Just these few motifs reveal something of the narration’s density – a narration that develops straight and without flourishes in front of our eyes, from a Sunday to a Saturday – seven short days of a week.
Clarity and mystery are no contradiction in the art of this film. It begins with a test of courage that Iwan, the youngest, fails. All jump from a tower construction on an embankment into the water, all but him who stays behind, paralysed by fear and mockery, trembling with cold and shame. His mother brings him back, comforts him and with calming words does her hug wrap him. This scene alone of the prologue is enough to make it unforgettable. The offense stays. It feeds a rebellious defiance that aggravates up to the point of readiness to kill and die. Over and over again, it has to be made forgotten with gestures of self-assurance and self-affirmation.
The defiance meets a man who suddenly wants to be a father to these two boys who have grown up fahterless. His absence stays an unrevealed mystery. Whether he was a soldier in some war or kept as a prisoner, whether he fled from his family and searched for the freedom of another life – this is left to our own imagination and assumptions. The film provides various hnts. The mother tells the boys that he was a pilot and thus engenders their fantasies. The absent and strange, yet still present father is a blind spot for which we search a destiny as well. Images have to fill his part, images like the one of the Last Supper to which he calls the family and where he distributes wine and meat. Images and a repertoire of behaviours that is traditional and authoritarian are meant to hide his vagueness. That the sons shall call him “Dad” is one of his rules to which Andrej obeys more willingly than Iwan. The rule is self-evident as well as arbitrary, no different from those rules that we sometimes follow, sometimes question.
As we see the father mostly from Andrej’s and Iwan’s point of view, we primarily notice his harsh tone, his strict orders and his punishments. A promise, a trip with the car to go fishing together are enough occasion to make meet rituals of obedience and resistance, and be it only the conflict over a banality: eating up the soup. The cause is in sharp contrast to the drama of the scene. Hungry Iwan refuses to even touch the ordered meal. The father gives him an ultimatum. The test of power remains unsettled, a pure parable. After all, the child learns how to politely call the waitress however run-down and random the restaurant in the Russian province may be. And, on second sight, we realise how the son despises a gift of nature to spite his father. Pemature sympathies that rely on our agreement with the son’s rebellion do not hold in Swaginzew’s narration. Nevertheless we still follow the trail that Iwan Turgenjew’s politico-psychological novel “Fathers and Sons” sketched in the 19th century, the attraction of a consciousness that tradition has lost.
Finally, the built-up tension vents itself on an island in the middle of nowhere. An archaic myth that Freud’s psychoanalysis renewed, comes back – even if it looks like a coincidence like in Hitchcock’s films. We have hoped for this coincidence, says Freud. And we only recognise what we have lost when it is too late. The director himself spoke of “a mythical glance at human life” that underlies his film. Swaginzew hints at a happier version of his narration, a film without questions, in a montage of black and white photographs, an epilogue, that follows the end. Very discretely, Abraham’s sacrifice, the Last Supper, the allusion to a painting of Jesus in his death, painted by Andrea Mantegna and already quoted in Pasolini’s “Accatone”, remind of motifs of the Jewish-Christian tradition and of the topic of a historically silenced and absent God-Father. Let us begin to ask questions. In the spirit of an beginning, the crew of enthousiastic beginners - director, composer, actors, cameraman and producer – have created a lasting oeuvre in which we meet ourselves.
A film that takes up the tradition of a Russian art cinema represented especially by Andrej Tarkowskij. The journey of a father with his two sons to a lonely island develops into a mythical drama. It shares the spiritual intensity that is linked to Tarkowskij and is justly celebrated as the return of Russian cinematic art in the cinema of the world.
Translation: Lara Schneider