We could hardly contain our excitement when we learned that director Andrey Zvyagintsev had finally readied his follow-up to 2004’s The Return, the best film of that year. The Banishment’s blistering opening sequence seemed to indicate it had been worth the wait. A wildly exciting extended overture begins with a car thundering past a solitary tree in a field and ends with Mark’s (Baluev) arrival in a distinctly grey, post-Stalinist city where he hopes his brother Alex (Lavronenko), can help remove a bullet lodged in his arm.
Taking the form of a relay, the film then switches focus to follow Alex as he moves to his late father’s house in the country with wife Vera and their children Eva and Kir (Shibaev) in tow. Mere hours after their arrival Vera announces to her husband: “I’m expecting a child. It’s not yours.” Alex refuses to entertain any possible explanations his spouse might have. As his resentment grows, he turns to his brother who advises to kill or forgive.
Despite the melodramatic potential of this material, The Banished prefers stately, impeccably framed static shots to action. But beneath this inertia there are clues about Vera’s predicament that neither we nor Alex can guess at.
Zvyagintsev embellishes the drama with biblical references – the children piece together a jigsaw puzzle of Da Vinci’s ‘The Annunciation’, the house is decorated with pictures of Adam and Eve – until his game plan becomes apparent. Though ostensibly based on William Saroyan’s 1953 novella ‘The Laughing Matter’, Zvyagintsev’s film seeks to reenact nothing less than the Fall of Man.
In this the director almost succeeds, though the allusions are too forced and the coda is too long in the making. Cinematographer Mikhail Krichman’s lenswork might be painterly and beautiful, but even the least eventful Tarkovsky film seems positively racy by comparison.
Intrigue and atmosphere can only do so much. Next time, more plot, please.