The Banishment (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2007)

I found the opening sequence of this completely gripping. A speeding car passes from an idyllic countryside to a rain-sodden city. The driver – we learn this at the point when he is forced to stop at a level crossing to allow a train to pass – has a wounded arm that he's tourniqued with a belt. Is some kind of dystopian crime drama in the offing? Unfortunately after this things rather fall away, and all that remains of such a drama are the vaguest background hints. The driver, Mark (played by Aleksandr Baluev) turns out to be our protagonist's brother, Alex (Konstantin Lavroneko), who soon returns to the idyllic countryside with his family – wife, son and daughter – to their country house there. It isn't long before it becomes clear that allegory is on the cards. With a vengeance! The film offers such a compote of allegories that we're left largely with muddle. Specifically, the two children are aligned with Adam and Eve – the son, Kir, is given the power to name a young foal; the daughter is called Eva and is even at one point told to pass her mother an apple! The film's title, Izgnanie in Russian is, as Tony Wood points out in his New Left Review article on Zvyagintsev, the Russian word used to refer to the expulsion from Eden. But this was clearly not enough allegory for Zvyagintsev, so the mother is also pregnant, with an unspecified father. At one point, to help us out if we've not spotted the allusion yet, the children construct a jigsaw of the Annunciation.(Things seem to have been even clunkier in the source novel, which I have not read: the protagonist of William Saroyan's The Laughing Matter is called Evan Nazarenus.) What sense we are to make of Mary and Joseph being the parents of Adam and Eve is unclear (to complicate matters still further there seem to me to be indications that the two brothers are in a sense two sides of the same person); Wood quotes the director as saying that Alex is "a 'new Joseph', who wants to expel Mary for the Immaculate Conception [he must mean the virgin birth], but in this case is tragically 'unable to hear the voice of the angel that is speaking to him' ... 'we are all of us Eves and Adams', and the banishment of the film's title is not a single event but a permanent human condition: 'we have all of us been banished'." Despite the fine acting the indefiniteness of setting, with regard both to location and to time, hamstrings the possibility of focusing on characters and narrative on their own terms. It's also stylistically self-regarding, chock full of aggressively shallow focus and explicit nods to Tarkovsky, in particular. It all adds up to the kind of thing that allows some film scholars to claim that there's such a thing as an "art cinema" genre (is there a genre of painting called "art painting"?). Darren Aaronovsky's Mother! may be a much sillier film than this, but if you want a confused muddle of allegories, at least it's also much more fun.