A talented Russian creates suspense, but doesn't know what to do with it
The Banishment (12A) dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Andrey Zvyagintsev's second feature, The Banishment, begins with what will become a recurring image - a car approaching from the distance at great haste. Admirers of this director's gripping debut, The Return, which featured its own long and traumatic car journey, will have an inkling that the vehicle is not being driven by a kissogram girl who's late for a birthday bash.
Sure enough, the man at the steering wheel has lost a great deal of blood - very nearly an armful, as Tony Hancock would've put it. Hancock would be right at home in The Banishment. Everyone wears his trademark expression, the deflated look of a terminal patient who has just been told that the kitchen is closed. "You never know what's waiting for you" is one of the film's more light-hearted lines.
The arrival of the injured fellow at the home of his brother, Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko), establishes an atmosphere of violence and foreboding, but turns out to be incidental to the story. Instead, the film follows Alex, his wife, Vera (Maria Bonnevie), and their two children on holiday to a country house. The setting is idyllic, but something isn't right.
The camera observes the family's evening meal through the window, like a stalker. Alex's son, Kir (Maxim Shibaev), points out disappointedly that the creek isn't flowing. Vera breaks down for no apparent reason and Alex offers nothing in the way of sympathy. You might say their creek isn't flowing either. What's the Russian for "communication breakdown"?
Eventually, Vera drops the sort of bombshell that would keep a soap opera in tears and tantrums for several Christmas specials. I won't reveal exactly what she says, but it is one of those things that no man wants to hear from his wife. Alex stalks off in a rage, while Kir swaps notes with a friend about the peculiar ways of parents.
Zvyagintsev is a master at directing children, as he proved with The Return, and although The Banishment is less dependent on youthful performers (one of its flaws is that it never seems fully invested in anyone except Alex), he still keeps an attentive eye on the consequences of the adults' behaviour. His work translates into cinematic form Philip Larkin's views on mums and dads.
Zvyagintsev is also brilliant at building mood and sustaining tension. An hour in, I had chewed all my fingernails to the bone. Half an hour after that, I'd started on the fingernails of the person sitting next to me. To say that the film's mood is portentous would be selling it short; if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had galloped into the cinema, they would have resembled a low-level gymkhana by comparison.
But this is a very long picture, and a film-maker has to know what to do with all that suspense - how to release it within the drama, rather than fobbing off the audience with makeshift explanations and anticlimaxes. Whatever other skills Zvyagintsev possesses, this one evades him. Late in the day, there is a revelation (yes, another one) which is so implausible that it shakes your faith in the film. In its exploration of the limits of love, the screenplay requires Vera to say something that is not strictly accurate, and then to refuse to recant it, even when several lives, including her own, are put in danger. To add insult to injury, the suffering that Vera endures is shown exclusively through the anguish it causes the male characters. Anyone who thinks Hollywood cinema has a monopoly on treating women as ornaments need only stay until the end of The Banishment to have that belief contradicted.
The picture was first shown at Cannes last year, and I had assumed the delay in its release was due to it being considered too taxing. The opposite proves to be true. Zvyagintsev supplies every last piece of the jigsaw, and forces them all into place for us. The first 90 minutes of the film is a killer. The last hour dies on the screen before our eyes.
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