The Return

By PETER CALDER

(Herald rating: * * * * )

Bleak and beautiful, this debut feature by Russian actor Zvyagintsev won the Golden Lion, the supreme award at the Venice Film Festival.

It recalls the entrancing and enigmatic masterpieces of Andrei Tarkovsky, whose Solaris, Stalker and Andrei Rublev were among the landmark films of the 1970s, but there is nothing arcane about it.

The Return unfolds as a plain and unadorned story of an estranged father and his confused sons. Teenagers Vanya (Dobronravov) and Andrey (Garin) live with their mother (Vdovina) and grandmother in a grim, provincial town. One day their father (Lavronenko), who had deserted the family when Vanya was small, returns as suddenly as he left. He offers no explanation, although he will later mutter darkly that he's eaten "too much fish far away".

He says he's taking the boys on a camping and fishing trip. Andrey is keen but the younger Vanya, who has never known his father and nurses a natural rage towards him, is defiant.

The father has some other, apparently shady, but never-explained business to attend to en route, but the main business of the journey is for father and sons to get to know each other - or rather to demonstrate that they are variously unwilling, desperate or unable to do so. The father's past physical absence is matched by his present emotional remoteness: full of bizarre demands and harsh judgments. The trip soon looks like a holiday from hell.

Unsurprisingly, the relationships between the members of this trio are laced with Biblical imagery.

Our first glimpse of the father has him sleeping, seen from the foot of the bed, in a shot effortlessly reminiscent of Andrea Mantegna's stark 15th-century portrait of the dead Christ, and the kids have kept a picture of him in a book of etchings, next to one that shows Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac.

In a superb cast, the young Dobronravov, whose luminous, harrowingly authentic performance is beyond praise, stands out. At the film's beginning and end, his young Vanya has to climb a tower and the difference between the two scenes is a measure of what has happened in the seven days the film covers. It is only then that we realise what the film has been about - and whose story it is.

Haunting, evocative and handsome, this is a deeply impressive movie which lingers in the mind for days. And it just may signal the arrival of a worthy successor to Tarkovsky.


CAST: Vladimir Garin, Ivan Dobronravov, Konstantin Lavronenko, Natalia Vdovina

DIRECTOR: Andrey Zvyagintsev

RUNNING TIME: 106 mins

RATING: M (adult themes)

SCREENING: Lido from Thursday.