A Gen­tle Creature

In 2014’s ani­mat­ed fea­ture, The Lego Movie, the world as pre­sent­ed as a grat­ing dystopia where hap­pi­ness reigns supreme and the glob­al anthem is titled, ​‘Every­thing is Awe­some’. If you can imag­ine a dia­met­ri­cal­ly oppo­site ver­sion of this image, you’re half way to com­pre­hend­ing the near-par­o­d­ic lev­els of bleak­ness on show in Sergei Loznitsa’s Russ­ian mis­er­ab­list epic, A Gen­tle Crea­ture. The anthem here should be, ​‘Every­thing is Awful’, and every­one should be forced to sing it, all day, every day.

Curios­i­ty killed the cat, and that seems to be the proverb that applies to all life in mod­ern Rus­sia. Vasili­na Makovt­se­va is the unsmil­ing ​“crea­ture” of the title who returns home one day to a col­lec­tion card from the post office. A care pack­age of canned food, sent to her hus­band who is lan­guish­ing in a Siber­ian prison, has been returned to her for rea­sons unknown. He is inside on a pos­si­bly trumped-up mur­der charge, but she believes he is inno­cent. With no infor­ma­tion or the abil­i­ty to con­tact her incar­cer­at­ed beau, she decides to hop on a train to Siberia and suc­cumb to the foul tor­ments of a bar­barous prison town.

Dis­cov­er­ing rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly that this was no sim­ple admin­is­tra­tive sna­fu, the woman then gives her­self over to the pimps and rack­e­teers in the hope that she’ll some­how find her answer. She seems utter­ly untrou­bled by dan­ger, con­stant­ly hand­ing over her pass­port to ran­dom tyrants who claim to want to help her (even though she’s been hood­winked over and over again). She goes deep­er and deep­er down this fes­ter­ing rab­bit hole, and all you want her do to is get back on the train, go back to her coun­try shack and play with her dog.

This inevitably makes for drea­ry and pun­ish­ing cin­e­ma, and this is a work that will have you leav­ing the audi­to­ri­um with head slung low and heart slung low­er. Makovt­se­va is low-key pow­er­ful in the lead, some­how remain­ing utter­ly mys­te­ri­ous and blank as a char­ac­ter, yet doing just enough that you pine for her to live long enough to expe­ri­ence the next vio­lent encounter. Yet the film is some­thing of a bust, and its con­ceit­ed ded­i­ca­tion to despair presents a world which mix­es lit­er­ary grotesque with some gar­bled attempts at social realism.

When she realis­es that her odyssey is point­less and that there are far more press­ing con­cerns in Moth­er Rus­sia than a miss­ing pris­on­er, Loznit­sa takes a bold styl­is­tic U‑turn before unload­ing a final shot­gun car­tridge to the face with a sil­ly coda. This clos­ing image appears to sug­gest that Rus­sia is phys­i­cal­ly abus­ing its pop­u­lous and it has the mus­cle to get away with it. But this is a prob­lem that will per­sist while there remains a desire to dis­cov­er the real truths as opposed to the offi­cial ones.