The banishment

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Movie
German title The banishment
Original title Изгнание
Country of production Russia
original language Russian
Publishing year 2007
length 157 minutes
Rod
Director Andrei Svyagintsev
script William Saroyan ,
Artyom Melkumyan ,
Oleg Negin
production Dmitri Lesnewski
music Arvo Pärt , Andrei Dergachev
camera Mikhail Krichman
cut Anna Mass
occupation

The Banishment ( Russian Изгнание , Isgnanije , The Banishment ) is a Russian drama directed by Andrei Svyagintsev from 2007. Konstantin Lavronenko was named best actor in Cannes 2007. The material was developed very freely based on the template "The Laughing Matter" by the writer William Saroyan . The elliptical , almost unreliably told story is about an alienated marriage with traditional gender roles , the inability or unwillingness to listen, and the breakup of a family.

action

Mark races from the country to the urban region in an automobile - in an unspecified contemporary country. There he arrives in a thunderstorm night in a depopulated industrial landscape . At a level crossing he is forced to brake hard. While the train is passing, he ties his arm off. In town he looks for his brother Alex, who painfully pulls the projectile out of his arm. He asks Alex why he isn't selling his parents' farm and about his new job.

Alex rides on the train with his son Kir, his wife Vera and their daughter Eva . In the deserted landscape, the family prepares the dilapidated, ancient farm and moves in. He bathes his daughter and they go picking walnuts with their young children. Vera bursts into tears at the sink. There is an odor in the house. In the cold marriage, the partners seem to be shaped by the difficult economic circumstances to such an extent that real communication is hardly possible. Vera tells him that she is pregnant but that the child is not his . Alex threatens her with serious consequences and urges her to have an abortion, but at the same time quarrels with himself. He orders her to go to bed. Alex fears that he could harm her with the pistol in the drawer cabinet.

He borrows the car from Georgy's son Max, who is the postman in town. Georgy, Max and the dead drunk Viktor are visiting with their families. The children play in the forest and around the house, Viktor slurs incoherently. His son mentions to Alex that Alex's friend “Uncle” Robert Vera visited when he was “making money” while his mother sent the children to the circus. His gambling addict brother Mark calls him, who gives him the advice at the next meeting: “Kill if you want to kill. […] Forgive if you want to forgive. ” Mark lives apart from his own children , but claims that it is okay with him. For a moment there is hope that Alex and Vera could be “father and mother” to the unborn child . Alex takes a long distance call, but nobody answers. He recognizes the phone number as his friend Robert's. You visit the unlabeled grave of your grandfather. Viktor picks up the children, where they and his children put a jigsaw puzzle of da Vinci's Annunciation. The young Frida reads 1 Cor 13.1-13  EU including a bookmark of the expulsion from the paradise of Masaccio . Meanwhile, Alex and Mark have a specialist perform the abortion illegally. Complications later develop and Vera falls into a coma and dies. You call Gherman, a doctor friend of yours, who then wants to say something to Mark, but Mark doesn't listen. After hastily preparing for Vera's funeral, Mark has a heart attack. Gherman tells Mark that he found a letter from her on the back of the pregnancy test that she woke up after the abortion and took an overdose of morphine tablets. Against Gherman's fervent warning, Mark later gets up to go to Vera's funeral and then apparently dies . Alex leaves money for the doctor who packs everything up in the yard and barricades the windows again. Alex takes the gun with him and drives the route that was shown at the beginning to his friend Robert. After a completely detached tracking shot that leads through the morass under the farm, a thunderstorm breaks out.

Alex sleeps in the car in front of Robert's house and finds the test in the glove compartment where Mark left it. With the pistol on the table in front of them, Alex and Robert deal with the letter. A flashback follows: Robert receives a phone call from Vera who has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. He drives to her apartment in the city and helps her to empty the contents of her stomach. There is closeness between them. They look at family photos together. She talks about her positive pregnancy test that her postman had delivered to Max. From Vera's remarks it is clear that she has been very unhappy with Alex for a long time because he does not understand her. His love for her and the children is only for himself, he loves them like property. The child is from him in the physical sense, but in the metaphysical sense the children do not belong to their parents. This makes it clear that Alex misunderstood her message that the child was not his in the direct physical sense and thus misunderstood it. After this scene the children come back from the circus with Nina. Kir expresses his anger at Robert's presence.

We see Alex in the sunny fields with a calm smile; he seems to have made his peace with the world. Peasant women thresh hay and sing together. Then a maid carries a crying baby through her midst.

Reviews

German-language press

Because the film did not come to cinemas in Germany, the German press only discussed it within the Cannes coverage. Susan Vahabzadeh, Süddeutsche Zeitung , said that the narrative puzzle pieces correspond to the situation as the protagonist perceives them. It was only very late that he realized through his wife, “that he hadn't noticed anything about what was going on in her for a long time. How you actually share your irritations and misunderstandings, how what has been said, how the misinterpreted facial expressions finally come together logically, Zviagintsev staged quite calmly. ”According to Spiegel critic Wolfgang Höbel, Svjaginzew narrates“ with sacred fervor and biblical force, with indulgent images of nature and roaring chants ”. This style has been completely wrongly mocked by some critics, because it expresses the topic that men cannot talk about their feelings. Hanns-Georg Rodek ( Die Welt ) declared Svyaginzew to be the most interesting young director from Russia, with a universe in which “men frozen in harshness and silence, as well as women play a role who try to save their sons from the same fate as their fathers . ”Unfortunately the film was“ a quarter or half an hour too long ”. The Russian was forcing the “metaphysical foundation all too deliberately”, judged the lexicon of the international film , but the story about male ignorance was “confidently staged as an old Russian anti-modern mental battle”.

Christoph Egger reviewed the work on the occasion of its Swiss theatrical release in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung . The core of the film, not only in terms of content, but also formally, is the riddle. This results in “despite all the impressiveness of the pictures, a certain disparity.” Verena Lueken from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung is also skeptical : “No place is simply a place, no object without a symbolic charge, no walk without deeper meaning, and if it is in the City hails, while the sky was still cloudless in the country, you know where you are. [...] something religious, then a banal marital crisis and finally another great metaphor for the cycle of life. ”In a similar way, Rudolf Worschech spoke in epd Film of a“ powerful parable with little content ”.

Other reviews

  • “Sound and image are not only modeled for the sake of beauty […] Some critics have complained about the ending. It's one of those moments when everything is postponed, not just for shock and amazement, but more fundamentally; so that one questions everything that happened, everything that was said, done, felt before. Style and expectations like a different one "( Jennie Kermode : Eye for Film)
  • "In the last hour, many puzzle pieces come into play that were not missing at all [...]" (DVD Outsider)
  • “There is an extraordinary film somewhere under this pile of ideas that could have been worked out better in the editing room. [...] The end of the story arc in the long flashback doesn't clear up the least bit, and doesn't help our understanding in any way [...] I'm afraid that was a minor mistake by this director and I'm still undecided whether the center is a secret or just a jumble is hidden. "( Peter Bradshaw : The Guardian )

backgrounds

The film was shot in Belgium , France and Moldova in Charleroi and near Cahul, among others .

The film premiered on May 18, 2007 in Cannes . On November 7, 2007, it was shown at the Cottbus Film Festival .

The Magnificat by Johann Sebastian Bach is used in the middle section .

Awards and nominations

Cannes International Film Festival 2007

European Film Award 2007

  • Nominated European Film Award in the Best Cinematography category for Michail Kritschman

Moscow International Film Festival 2007

  • Russian Film Clubs Federation Award in the Russian Program category for Andrei Svyagintsev

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Graffy, see web links.
  2. ↑ see Annunciation of the Lord .
  3. ^ A b c Jay Weissberg: The Banishment. In: Variety . May 18, 2007, accessed October 20, 2008 .
  4. ↑ see Fall of Man .
  5. ^ A b Peter Bradshaw : The Banishment. In: The Guardian . August 15, 2008, accessed on October 21, 2008 (English): “There is an outstanding film somewhere inside this sprawling mass of ideas, which might have been shaped more exactingly in the edit. […] Bringing the story looping round into an extended flashback, doesn't clarify or extend our understanding. [...] I can't help feeling that this is a slight misstep from this director, and can't decide whether his film has at its center a mystery or a muddle "
  6. ↑ Susan Vahabzadeh: Longing for Emotions . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung , May 19, 2007
  7. ↑ Wolfgang Höbel: Smiles forbidden! In: Der Spiegel , May 18, 2007
  8. ↑ Hanns-Georg Rodek: The best year in ages . In: Die Welt , May 24, 2007
  9. ^ Lexicon of International Films : The Banishment , accessed October 20, 2008
  10. ↑ Christoph Egger: In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , November 27, 2008, p. 49
  11. ↑ Verena Lueken: The deeper wisdom of the hail . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 18, 2007
  12. ^ Rudolf Worschech: Art and Glamor - Closing of the 60th Cannes Film Festival . In: epd film . Issue 2007/6. Joint work of Protestant journalism.
  13. ↑ Jennie Kermode: The Banishment. In: Eye for Film. Retrieved on October 21, 2008 (English): “This is sound and vision crafted not simply for the sake of beauty […] A number of critics have complained about the ending of this film. It's one of those moments when everything shifts not for the sake of a shocking twist but on a much more fundamental level, one which will make you question everything that has been said and done and felt before. There's a change in style and expectation "
  14. ^ Richard Corliss, Mary Corliss: Three Twisty Delights. In: Time . May 18, 2007, accessed on February 10, 2009 (English): "stares boldly into the chasm between male and female points of view"
  15. ↑ Slarek: Family business. In: DVD Outsider. Retrieved on February 10, 2009 : "What the last hour does most effectively is complete a jigsaw that has far more pieces than the first half chose to suggest"
  16. ↑ a b IMDb , see web links.
  17. ↑ a b Beumers, see web links.