European Films

The Closing Film of the 63rd Venice Film Festival was Pavel Lounguine's Ostrov (The Island), not exactly a crowd-pleaser though certainly a festival film. With strong hints of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (though in its Christian reconfiguration Guilt and Redemption), the Russian religious drama tells the story of a man whose forced yet inexcusable acts during WWII are connected to a story of the holy man Anatoly, a man with a tainted conscience who lives in a 1976 monastic community on the titular island. The film's tonal shifts are perhaps too jarring and its portrayal of Anatoly is too sketchy to make him anything beyond the outline of a Dostoyevskian protagonist, but the film certainly has a lot of interesting ideas to propose for those interested in such matters. Upscale European film festivals and arthouses that attract older, sophisticated audiences might bite. 

 

In a pre-title sequence simply called "War. 1942." and shot in grainy, almost bichrome blue-and-black palette, a sailor on a tugboat (Timofey Tribuntsov) is forced by the Nazis to shoot his captain (AlexeyTribuntsov) or be shot himself. Like in the Venice Competition entry Zwartboek (Black Book), people in war often try to save their own lives first and indeed such is the case here; something which the young sailor is unable to forgive himself. When we meet the man again, the title card reads "Monastery. 1976."  and we get to know him as Father Anatoly (Pyotr Mamonov), who is an anomaly in the small orthodox congregation of which he is part. He is regarded by the visiting laymen as a Holy Man who can provide absolution, exorcism and healing, but his clergy-brothers are not too fond of the old man's jokes and lack of respect for traditions and rules. Abbot Filaret (Viktor Sukhorukov) is informed by Father Job (Dmitry Dyuzhev) of Anatoly's transgressions: "He doesn't wash his hands. He is always late. And he has tea with laymen. With sugar!"

Anatoly tells a widow that her soldier husband is still alive but ailing and that she should go to France to see him before he dies. A limping boy is able to walk normally again after meeting with Anatoly and a day before a fire destroys part of Filaret's room, the bearded Anatoly playfully throws a charred log in front of the abbot. Is he a Holy Man, a crazy prankster or both? Lounguine's film never  answers this question, though it does become clear that Anatoly never thinks of himself as a Holy Man, though he does believe he should not be burdened with rules or assumptions from others about how to conduct his daily business.

 

The alternated scenes of playing pranks on his colleagues and curing his visitors are tonally so far apart that it is difficult to believe they come from the same person. In the film's closing section, things come full circle and are neatly resolved in a way that would have made Dostoyevsky proud, but the middle section is too unfocused to make the obligatory latter scenes as forceful as they could have been. It is clear from Dmitry Sobolev's script that the man is an enigma to everyone but himself, but the audience is kept too much on the outside for too long to create any sort of emotional attachment to Anatoly's personality. This distance stresses the parable-like nature of the film, but without any emotional attachment on the audience's behalf it all feels as cold as its Northern Russian setting.

 

Mamonov, a former rock singer who also starred in Lounguine's Taksi-Blyuz (Taxi Blues) and now lives a religious life, is unable to completely bridge the gap between the two different Anatolys provided by the script, though he certainly looks the part and is especially good in the mischievous scenes that reveal Anatoly's humanity.

 

Widescreen cinematography by Andrei Zhegalov, a frequent collaborator of Aleksander Rogozhkin (most recently on Peregon/Transit) beautifully captures the unwelcoming island where the monks have settled, with its constant coming and going of snow, ice and water. Art directors Alexander Tolkachev (who often works with independent director Vadim Abdrashitov) and Igor Kotsarev have created an austere setting for the small monastic community, where weathered and rotting wood peeps through the blankets of snow, the expanses of water and the little vegetation that manages to survive. The island's man-made structures seem to be growing in an almost perfect symbiosis with their natural surroundings, and corrosion is not so much as a sad event as a foregone and even welcome conclusion. The biblical "For dust you are and to dust you will return" seems not only to be on the minds of the inhabitants of the island, but also on the mind of the island itself.