With lengthy journeys in a purple camper van, lengthy unbroken pictures of shattered Caucasian landscapes, and really lengthy silences between its alienated father and daughter, Ilya Povolotsky’s debut characteristic has an odd confidence in its personal monumental dispiritedness. “I need to know that you’ve got a plan,” says {the teenager}. “And that we gained’t get caught someplace exterior Khabarovsk with a hen and a tragic librarian girl.” This being a Russian artwork movie, you wouldn’t wager towards it.
The 2 unnamed characters, performed by Maria Lukyanova and Gela Chitava, are making their approach throughout the nation for unspecified causes, aside from her want to see the ocean. They run a small cell cinema out of their van for wan residents of purgatorial steppe cities and flog snacks and porn by evening at sketchy truck stops for the hauliers who aren’t with intercourse employees. The daddy has transient liaisons of his personal, including an accusatory edge to his daughter’s faraway gaze, often mounted on nothing. Issues aren’t trying up once they attain the ocean; native persons are scooping lifeless fish off the foreshore. “Fish plague,” says a police officer. “You’d higher depart now.”
We discover out little tangible about both of them. However the much less is claimed, the extra insistently the areas concerned, between locations and other people, communicate. The daughter likes taking Polaroids to commemorate their likelihood encounters; Povolotsky operates in the identical method for this street film, persistently racking up eye-catching summations of the bodily and religious desolation across the pair, from tawdry malls to a dilapidated analysis centre. And the odd revelation, too, like a wondrous shot of her being caressed in a sunlit subject by large turbine shadows.
Not that that is the sort of movie to counsel that artwork and aesthetics are any redemption. Caught within the passenger seat, Lukyanova’s mute depth and cautious questions are the language of somebody who should really feel out their very own path ahead. This can be a charming odyssey via an virtually cosmic-sized immensity.
