The Return

When I think back on the movie The Return, the first thing that comes to mind is the color blue. There was water in almost every scene. The sky was always blue or gray, and it seemed to rain a lot.

You could have told me that this was a film by Tarkovsky and I wouldn't have known the difference. The influence Tarkovsky had on Zvyagintsev is obvious from the beginning. This film focuses a lot on the elements, much like Mirror. There is water everywhere - the boys live next to a lake (or ocean?), every time they stop to camp with their father they are by a body of water, and there are many scenes where it rains. Fire is in many scenes also, and there are a lot of shots of the wind blowing through fields. I also noticed the use of mirrors in a few scenes, like the father looking at Ivan in the back seat of the car through the rearview mirror. When Andrei went off to ask someone where they could find a restaurant, his father watches a woman walk past the car through the side and rear-view mirrors. Also, when the camera pans out through the woods at the end of the film, it is almost identical to the end of Mirror.

The area where The Return was shot looks much different from where Brother was shot. In Brother, St. Petersburg was very run-down and industrialized. But in The Return, the outskirts of St. Petersburg seem to be very calm and undisturbed.

I don't think the father is easy to describe. I still don't know what he came back to town for. It seems like he thinks he was doing his sons a favor by being so hard on them. He knows he isn't going to be around to raise them, so he wants them to have a few memories of him while he is visiting, even if they aren't really good ones. He knows that one day his sons will look back on their trip, and the way he treated him, and they will understand that he acted that way to make them stronger.

His sons seem to have very different reactions to his return. Ivan comes to hate the time he is spending with his father, and even says that if his father touches him again he will kill him. Andrei, however, will put up with his father to stay on his good side. I think Andrei has missed his father and will do anything he asks in hopes that he won't leave again. Andrei's relationship with his brother is also strained because of his father's return. Ivan does not understand why Andrei is so willing to obey their father.

I'm not sure what to make of the photos at the end though. They looked like they came from Andrei's camera, but a man in one of them (maybe the very last one) looked like it could have been a younger version of their father.