Cannes 2017: A Gentle Creature, film review – Nightmarish vision of hell in the heart of Russia

This film from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has only an ironic link to its title
Ordeal: Vasilina Makovtseva
David Sexton21 November 2017

A Gentle Creature is a short story by Dostoevsky, narrated by a middle-aged pawnbroker whose misunderstood teenage wife has committed suicide by jumping out of a window. Robert Bresson’s 1969 adaptation, Une Femme Douce, was his first colour film.

This film from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa has only an ironic link to its title. This gentle woman — played by Vasilina Makovtseva almost silently, with a clenched, enduring face — takes us on a nightmarish voyage into the bottomless pit of the Russian Federation, or perhaps just of eternal Russia herself. She lives alone in remote, impoverished countryside, working as a night guard at a primitive petrol station. One day, a parcel of necessities that she has sent to her husband, imprisoned in Siberia for murder, is returned to the post office without explanation, her first of many utterly frustrating — let’s not say Kafkaesque — struggles with brutally dismissive bureaucrats.

She sets off to take the parcel herself to the prison. The train is full of grotesque, singing drunks, obsessed with Russia’s wartime greatness. “Let’s drink to our great mission — to our enormous suffering.”

She can’t find out what has happened to her husband. Everybody she meets in the degraded prison town is a horror: the taxi driver, the prison staff, the obese brute of a woman who drags her off to her vile lodging house, the leering pimp who sizes her up, the corrupt police, the near-satanic local gang boss, even the hapless old lady who tries to run a human rights group. No one helps her: all have sinister tales of killings and body disposal to tell.

In a Twin Peaks-style fantasia, there’s a grand hearing in which all the people she has met pledge help but it suddenly turns into violent gang-rape. Then she wakes up in the packed station waiting room, full of sleeping wretches, and it starts all over again. Krotkaya is a vision of hell, conducted with the horrible brio of an angry parody by Shostakovich. A shocker here at Cannes.

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