Film Reviews by PB

Some time ago, after watching Zyvagintsev's "Leviathon", I wrote a review likening elements of that film to the poetry of film-director Andrei Tarkovsky.In Zvyagintsev's latest film "Loveless", the poetry of snowy landscapes, versified by slow, panning camera shots, the juxtaposition of an agelessness embodied by the camera lingering long over the bark of great trees, with the ephemerality of human lives evinced by the final shots high amongst the branches of the same trees of the last human contact the "unloved son" had with our "material" world, all conspire to create that same poetry that pervades Tarkovsky's films. And of course, the allegories within the film's construction, embodying indictment of today's Russian political system, are patent; the emotional bankruptcy that imbues the unbowdlerised desolation of a "destructed marriage", the emptiness of a building, once, presumably, the host of human warmth, now cold, empty and crumbling the allusions to Russian Orthodoxy and Sharia Law, the TV reports of Russia's "paternalistic" view of Ukraine and the former's annexation of Crimea.........And, the gossamer holding together these fragments of dissention is a Bergmann-esque portrait of scenes of mutual evisceration of each other by the 2 "adults" and much, much more heart-breaking, the witnessing of this horror by their unloved 12 year-old son. A masterpiece of a film.

"God's own country" is a poignant,sensitive exploration of a young man's emotional arousal amongst the bleak harshness of a Dales landscape. "Call me by your name" addresses similar issues in a sun-kissed Italian setting brimming with warmth and aspiration. In "God's own country" the catalyst to ignite the protagonist's emotions is absent; even the somewhat minimalist "ambient" sound-track embodies this absence. The inexorable challenge to existence imposed by the adversity of the Dales tightly constrains the young man's emotions, tethering them to episodes of drunken self-gratification within the confines of a pub's toilet-cubicle. But a chance event brings to the Dales farm a Romanian "casual" worker who not only "unlocks" the young man's eyes to the beauty of the landscape , but also liberates his passions, and, inevitably his vulnerability.

Leviathan is huge, creeping insight into the numbing paralysis that totalitarianism brings to individual aspirations. The camera glides slowly over a bleached wintry landscape in poetic phrases reminiscent of the Russian master Andrei Tarkovski. Time and its passing are embodied by tentative, almost caressing scenes of the age-less Leviathan, beached but intact, embedded in the sand.Wrecks of fishing boats litter the shallow waters a testament to the passage of time and foreshortening of human hope. A "plot" within the lines of this great "epic" has the protagonist cruelly tossed by both State and individual: powerless to affect his fate, he sinks beneath the surging onslaught, finally to succumb to the timelessness of the harsh, black and white landscape. A true "tour-de- force" of a film!