Pays : Film russe
Genre : Drame
Durée : 1h 20min
Date de sortie : prochainement
Avec Victor Nemets, Olga Shuvalova, Vladimir Golovin
Réalisé par Sergey Loznitsa
Le quotidien sordide de Georgi, un chauffeur routier russe. Une parabole sur la déliquescence d’un pays.
(L'avis exprimé par les rédacteurs de cette rubrique est indépendant du travail et des choix du Jury oecuménique.)
19 mai 2010
Two hours of joyless slices of fairly savage Russian life. The director, who has a documentary background, says that he intended a more sentimental initial story and his title, My Joy, was for that tale. When he cut that and turned grim, he kept the title, with the under-understatement that it was ironic.
He also speaks of his pallette, which may be the best way to interpret the succession of stories which don’t necessarily follow each other but are juxtaposed like colours on the pallette. Most of the stories are in the present, set in the area south of Moscow, stories of truck drivers, thieves (plenty of these), prostitutes, corrupt police, soldiers, people going mad. The two flashback stories to the end of World War II have a stronger narrative thrust and are, to those of us who like stories, more dramatically satisfying though emotionally straining : a soldier robbed by a superior office, then a pacifist schoolteacher robbed and brutalised by the soldiers returning from the German front, to whom he had given hospitality.
The film opens with a corpse being buried under concrete – the foundations of contemporary rebuilding of Russia symbolised as murderous ? In fact, corpses seem to bring to a close several of the stories, with five at the very end. Aesthetic joy, perhaps, but little emotional joy in My Joy.
