Imagine a Russo-Ukrainian version of Winter’s Bone—or Deliverance with Soviet-era shansons and folk ballads instead of Eric Weissberg’s dueling banjos.
The narrative of this dystopian odyssey encompasses a variety of oddments that feel filled with references to Russian and Soviet literature, culture and history. The viewer as though takes a long country walk with three people: one relates a story while another interjects comments, observations and non sequiturs along the way; a third, the camera, mutely gapes at its surroundings a beat behind the other two and longer than most people would consider polite.
(This observation refers to the film’s narrative style, not the two muzhiks and a mute the protagonist actually encounters in his ‘travels’.)
The story follows a tradition going back to the writer Nikolai Gogol’s amused and alarmed observations of what he and other Russian writers call poshlost’, a certain pig-eyed, smug provincial small-mindedness.
The new thing that writer and director Sergei Loznitsa has done here is to try to capture its endemic violence. This is compounded by the fact that these ‘provinces’ also witnessed some of the twentieth century’s most savage violence between 1930 and 1950.
In doing this, Loznitsa apparently raised hackles at home. In its political manifestation, the poshlost’ condemned would brush elbows with the kind of chauvinism that fires up the ever-willing audience for right wing demagogues.
In an opening 'comment' before the film’s title appears, two pairs of tattooed fists drag the body of an unidentified man to a deep ditch and bury him in fresh cement. This would make for a ‘concrete’ commentary on the application of the Soviet past to the free-enterprise Russian present, though poshlost’ long predates the Soviet period.
The main narrative opens on a summer day, with Georgi (Viktor Nemets), a Russian Everyman, setting out in the present from a decrepit, Soviet-era rustbelt factory with a truckload of cement (the plant appears to manufacture cement and seems to be the location of the opening ‘burial’)—though it could be flour. There are neat stacks of heavy brown burlap sacks of a powdered substance.
This delivery appears to be a routine job. Georgi stops at his apartment to pick up coffee and sandwiches for the trip. He looks in on but does not wake his apparently sleeping wife (Alisa Slepyan), and then sets off on his run.
A Sergeant Zhitsov of the traffic police (Pavel Vorozhtsov) signals Georgi over for an ‘inspection’ at a roadside outstation. This feels like a routine shakedown. An amusing pantomime Georgi observes through his windshield shows us that Zhitsov and his captain (Dmitrii Bykovskii) have much more interest in a young blonde (Anna Sheglakova) whose new foreign red convertible they pulled over before him.
While the policemen distract themselves with the blonde, Georgi pockets his identification and travel documents and leaves the outstation. He finds a weathered old man (Vladimir Golovin) in the passenger seat when he gets back to his truck.
Georgi gives the old man a ride. The old man tells Georgi he ‘lost his name’ as the result of a chain of events set in motion by the greed of a corrupt official (Dmitrii Gotsdiner). This happened to him as a demobilized young Red Army lieutenant (Aleksey Vertkov) returning home to his village in rural Russia from postwar Berlin in 1946.
The old man disappears when Georgi stops for fuel. His story would be cautionary, even prophetic, were Georgi more than just an everyday guy delivering a truckload of cement on an ordinary workday—and did this old man not to turn up later in the story.
Soon Georgi finds himself in a long line of cars waiting for police to clear an accident scene. Anxious to be on his way, a pint-sized prostitute (Olga Shuvalova), among several local women working the waiting motorists, shows Georgi a dirt path through the ‘condom-filled’ woods that brings them to the rural town where she lives.
The feral peasant faces and nothing-doing atmosphere of the place could be straight from Gogol or any number of Russian authors writing about rural Russia and Ukraine. Georgi stands in the midst of a burping, belching, and gawking, alcohol-addled, holy-fool manswarm in the town market with a look of stunned disbelief.
The filmmaker’s view of the ‘ugly’ rural peasantry reportedly was criticized as an unpatriotic calumny. These people and the variety of others with whom Georgi is soon to cross paths might be as much—or as little—an exaggeration as the ‘locals’ in John Boorman’s Deliverance (1972) or Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010).
Georgi drives out of the town alone: out of town, and as though into the forever of rural Russia and Ukraine. What had been relatively reliable Soviet-era secondary hardball roads with other vehicle traffic gradually narrows down to single lane rural routes as the sun sets, then dirt roads, then night steppe.
He tries to determine from local muzhiks where he lost his way but, as readers of Russian and Yiddish literature know, they would not be there themselves if they knew the way out.
This is where ‘luck’—the счастье (schást’ye) of the title—enters the picture. Although the English title renders счастье as ‘joy’, the same word also means ‘luck’: the entire narrative is fraught with happenstance and almost hermetically ‘joy’-proof.
In mulling over what to do with the stranger (Georgi) and his loaded truck, a muzhik baking potatoes in an open fire in the middle of a night field points out to an associate, ‘If luck (счастье—schást’ye) comes and you let it pass, you’ll be left to scratch your ass.’ There’s a lot of meditative ass-scratching in this movie.
‘Where’s the road,’ Georgi asks one of these men.
‘It’s not a road. It’s a direction.’
‘Well, where does that direction lead?’
‘Nowhere?’
‘What do you mean, “nowhere”?’
‘It’s a dead end, a cursed dead end.’
Gogol would have loved this. Yet it is only the beginning of this bedeviled, profoundly uncomprehending Everyman’s harrowing odyssey into a parallel dimension of naked unenlightened self-interest—poshlost’.
The ‘journey’ turns out to be centered on a ghost house; ghosts, spirits and eccentric visions abound in the land.
A former occupant of this traditional Russo-Ukrainian country house was a disaffected rural teacher (Konstantin Shelestun) slain by Red Army deserters at the beginning of the Great Fatherland War—World War II. This murder could be poshlost’ killing the potential for enlightened culture; and the ghost house, since peopled with gypsies and derelicts, the empty shell of the vaunted great Russian soul and the life-giving chernozem, or black earth—things that would anger nationalists.
The paradox about the socio-cultural morass into which Georgi descends is that while it seems boundless steppes beyond anything in his experience, he probably strays no more than 100 kilometers from his home.
According to the credits, the film was shot in Ukraine’s Chernihiv [Chernigov] province and the town is Shchors.
Against all odds, the story eventually loops back and resolves at the traffic police outstation in another season.
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