The Banishment (2008)
Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev
While vacationing in the countryside at his childhood home, a woman suddenly reveals to her husband that she is expecting a child – but not his.
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What critics compared The Banishment to
The first explicitly recalls the extended, behind-the-car tracking shot in Solaris, while the second, which is a long camera track looking into a mud puddle, seems to nod toward similar shots in Stalker.
Like Zvyagintsev’s second feature, The Banishment (07), Leviathan wears its religious themes on its sleeve—but in a more direct, down-to-earth manner than that rather portentous, overtly Tarkovskian exercise.
It is so slyly executed that this will probably be even more rewarding on a second viewing, but when first seen, its expansive nature at times, especially in the midway stretch, may risk inviting unflattering comparisons with Zvyagintsev’s unwieldy 157-minute sophomore feature, The Banishment (2007).
His 2003 debut "The Return" won the Golden Lion at Venice, 2007's "The Banishment" picked up Best Actor at Cannes, and 2011's "Elena" won the Special Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard.
In his three previous films ( The Return , The Banishment, Elena ), Zvyagintsev frequently pushed past sober into dour, leaning too heavily on a characteristically Soviet sense of gloom and doom.
His three previous features – “Elena,” “The Banishment” and “The Return” – are all highly accomplished works, but they’re also too oblique, too restrained and too unresolved to satisfy the expectations of mainstream moviegoers.
The narrative, co-written by Oleg Negin who also collaborated with Zvyagintsev on "The Banishment" and "Elena," begins with a simple premise: Auto-repair shop owner Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) must fight to keep his home and land from being seized by the crooked mayor (Roman Madyanov) of a remote fishing village near the Barents Sea in northern Russia.