Film
The Banishment
- Director
- Andrei Zvagintsev
- Certificate
- 12A
- Running Time
- 157 mins
In popular music, we’ve become used to Difficult Second Album Syndrome. A fresh-faced young act scores a massive hit with their debut and all eyes are on the follow-up. More often than not, this simply recapitulates the themes of their first record in a long-winded way, with smugness and self-satisfaction well to the fore. It promptly bombs. Here’s the filmic equivalent. Back in 2003, Andrei Zvyagintsev made an enormous impression with his accomplished debut, The Return. His 2007 follow-up runs for nearly an hour longer than its predecessor, going heavy on Biblical imagery and unanswered questions once again, but comes across as a calculated, bum-punishing arthouse miseryflick contrived to set beards a-tingling as its apes the likes of Bergman and Tarkovsky.
Even though everyone speaks Russian, we’re in an unnamed Eastern European country where it rains an awful lot. Taciturn, grim-faced Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko, returning from, er, The Return) seems to be some kind of gangster. He’s first seen patching up his brother Mark (Aleksandr Baluev), who’s been shot in the arm in an incident which is never explained or referred to again. This is clearly the kind of fella you don’t want to tangle with, and if you were his long-suffering missus Vera (Nowegian actress Maria Bonnevie) you might think twice before announcing that you’re pregnant with a child that isn’t his during a holiday/lying-low period with your two young children at his family’s ramshackle bolthole in the idyllic countryside (actually Moldova, fact fans). Initially, Alex accepts the news with typical stoicism, stomping off to the pub to brood – for he is particularly good at brooding. But he eventually confides in Mark, who suggests the options are to kill Vera or forgive her. Oh, and if he chooses the former, he’ll find a gun stashed handily in a bedroom drawer.
Loosely adapted from a short story by William Saroyan, this is a long, slow, self-consciously enigmatic plod, whose excellent cinematography and strong performances cannot mitigate the heavy-handed Biblical overtones (including an actual reading from Corinthians, in case you didn’t geddit) and an extraordinarily clumsy extended third act flashback, which is intended to shed light on Vera’s motivation for sparking the unfolding tragedy but merely unbalances the film and throws up more questions than it answers.
It’s back on screen in the ‘shed’s January Andrei Zvyagintsev Sunday brunch season, screened as an appetiser for his new one, Loveless, which opens in February.
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