THE BANISHMENT

From the director of THE RETURN

THE BANISHMENT (CERT TBC)

(Izgnanie)

A film by AndreY Zvyagintsev

WINNER BEST ACTOR - Konstantin Lavronenko

– Cannes Film Festival 2007

Starring

Konstantin Lavronenko, Alexander Baluev and Maria Bonnevie
In Russian with English subtitles / Russia 2007 / 150 mins

UK RELEASE DATE: 15 August 2008

Opening at selected West End Venues

and selected cinemas nationwide

An Artificial Eye Release

The Banishment (Based on a short story by William Saroyan entitled ‘The Laughing Matter’) is Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s second feature following his Golden Lion win with The Return in 2003.

This is a tale of pride and patriarchy, which illuminates the dark soul of the Russian male. The rural setting and tragic tale suggest something as earthy and epic as an Emile Zola novel or as majestic Greek tragedy.

Alex (Lavronenko) returns after 12 years to the countryside. Accompanied by his wife Vera (Bonnevie) and their two children, he settles into an old family house. There are fires in the grate, walnut trees in the grounds and it is almost too idyllic to be true.

Alex seems to be a man with a history of violence, drawn from a family pre-disposed to fracture and heartache. His brother Mark (Baluev) no longer sees his children. The great moral dilemma arrives for Alex when Vera informs him that she is pregnant and the child is not his. His word is law and his instincts spark a chain of tragic consequences……

The cinematography by Mikhail Krichman captures the countryside with blistering beauty whilst the brooding score by Andrey Dergatchev and Arvo Part increases the likelihood of comparisons with the films of David Lynch.

All the actors are excellent, but Norwegian-born Ingmar Bergman veteran Maria Bonnevie is superb. She becomes the most compelling human figure in the film.

"In filmmaking, reality is so present that it is difficult to be detached from it. But you have to succeed in doing so to reach another, higher level of reality. When you are directing a film, you have to create a world, and make the invisible visible, which is an exceedingly complex task.

"The Sacrifice is my favourite film. People often ask me if Tarkovsky was an influence on my filmmaking. If his films did have any influence on me, it was not in a conscious way. I also like Antonioni." - Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev was born in Novosibirsk in 1964. After graduat­ing from theatre school he worked in the theatre. In 1986, he moved to Moscow where he graduated from the acting department of the Moscow State Theatre School . Zvyagintsev then worked as an actor in independent theatre projects and acted in several films. The Return, his feature debut received two Golden Lions at the Venice IFF for Best Film and Best Debut. The film won more than 40 international awards including the European Film Academy Discovery – Prix Fassbinder, the Rus­sian Film Academy Award GOLDEN EAGLE for Best Film and Best Cinematography, a nomination for the HFPA GOLDEN GLOBE in the category of Best Foreign Film, the Swedish Film Institute Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a nomination for a Cesar in the cat­egory of Best Foreign Film, a BBC World Cinema Award for Best Foreign Film, and the FIPRESCI Award for Best Foreign Language Film at Palm Springs IFF.

The Banishment (dir Andrei Zvyagintsev 2007 from a novel by William Saroyan)is set in a European anywhere that could be France, the Low Countries or Western Russia, is at once allegorical or mythopoeic blasted inner-city industrial landscape contrasted with an idyllic countryside cottage on a causeway connected to a mainland by a wooden bridge. The built-up mood throughout the film is what matters, rather than the narrative and the characters underscored by the music of the Lithuanian composer, Arvo Part. Arvo Part’s music is lugubrious yet undeniably powerful, as it restrains elements of the music of Bach’s Oratorios into a much more minimal musical landscape, a perfect backdrop to The Banishment. Part’s music appears during a series of epiphanies that are darkly highlighted by glowering weather and seemingly infinite silences, as well as the stark, cobalt blue décor of the farmhouse.

The influence of Bergmann is ever-present (Maria Bonnevie – Vera in the film worked alongside Bergmann, but she is the only non-Russian actor present) in the tormented, spiritually desolate internal landscape that Zvyagintsev delineates. Briefly a man moves his wife and two children from the city to his father’s farmhouse in the hope of better work prospects. While in the country the wife reveals something that threatens to tear the family apart.

Paul Murphy

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington

Maharajah: The Victoria and Albert Museum, South Kensington  This is an unbelievably impressive exhibition maintaining the usual high standard of events at the V & A. India was overwhelmed by stronger neighbours, then by Western Imperialists, seeking a colony that fitted with their nostrums, that might be strategically advantageous. Even today the current war is based really on Indo-Pakistan relations representing the Islamification of east and west India (now Pakistan and Bangladesh) first brought about by the Moghuls. The Moghuls, a nation that originated in Persia but actual descendants of the Timurids, hence their homeland Moghulistan (Mongolistan). The Moghuls were essentially militaristic, even more militaristic than the native Rajputs, who seemed to have lived by a kind of Zealot ethic, preferring suicide to dishonour. They were clearly a very powerful presence until their influence waned and the British came to establish the Raj, but the words we have of 'Indian'
Read more

THE PAINTED VEIL and LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

The Painted Veil (2006), dir John Curran, starring Edward Norton, Naomi Watts, Diana Rigg and Love in the Time of Cholera (2007), dir Mike Newell, starring Javier Bardem The Painted Veil , adapted from a Somerset Maugham novel, is a moving tale of a love affair played out before the backdrop of a cholera epidemic in China sometime in the early 20th century. The film depicts the horrors of cholera, the beauty of the Chinese landscape, the trials and tribulations of Walter and Kitty Fane’s relationship. Love in the Time of Cholera , (another adaptation from the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, adapted by Ronald Harwood) shares with The Painted Veil the theme of Europeans in a non-European locale, coping, or failing to cope, with cholera. In The Painted Veil , Walter Fane (played by Edward Norton, an American actor with a high art reputation), a British medical official sent to a remote Chinese Province to help control a cholera epidemic is estranged from his wife Kitty, who has be
Read more

Notes on the films of Sam Peckinpah

Last evening I watched Pat Garret and Billy the Kid by Sam Peckinpah.   I haven't seen such a film for a very long time, dull melancholic edge tainted with sadness and elegiac to the core.   I noticed that there were many production problems, as many as 6 editors, and Peckinpah disowned the film eventually.   I think the problem with the film, however, is Bob Dylan, not the editing.   He clearly can't act, his presence is irritating and, apart from the well-known song, hardly quoted in the film, the soundtrack is underwhelming.   There were so many laudable cameos otherwise, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards, Harry Dean Stanton, and Kris Kristoffersen who pulls it off somehow as Billy but who knows what his acting is really like.   I really wished someone would shoot Dylan just to get him out of the film, instead Pickens is shot and various other worthwhile character actors. The still centre of the film is James Coburn in this, his second film for Peckinpah.   After he shoots Billy
Read more