New Year

January 2nd:

My Joy, starring Viktor Nemets (Russian)

Oh, Russian films like this get me so excited.

"Where does this road lead?"
"What road?"
"The one somewhere around here. I came out of the woods and lost my way."
"It's not a road, it's a direction."
"A direction leading where?"
"Nowhere."
"What do mean, nowhere?"
"Like I say, nowhere. It's a dead-end, an accursed dead-end."

The movie deserves a second watch and probably a third, too. It's brilliant and punishing, has the long single takes I love so much (Especially long walking scenes. Russians walk.), and sparse, stern dialogue with matter-of-fact delivery.

For one scene you become the walker and watcher of faces in the crowd in the village. Each face: is this the face that will be important, is the face I will now follow, what is that face doing, who are they, do I need to worry about any of the faces, are they worried about me, how long can I walk and watch faces?

The rest of the movie follows the Viktor and his dead-end in the cursed village.  WWII does play into the movie as a kind of context, or background, for the older character's deeply unsentimental views on living and surviving, but the movie is firmly contemporary.

An old-timer vet, with all his medals on, walks down a snowy road, talking to himself:
"Trails, trails. I killed those trails and they vanished into thin air. Comrade General, slain trails have been  added to the mass grave... Our victory erased all trails."
A van pulls up to ask where the village is and the old man bangs the side of the van with his thick walking stick, nearly hitting the passenger. The passenger calls the old man a lunatic and the van drives off and the passenger promptly becomes a lunatic himself.

That's the way of this movie.