Cannes 2010: 'Schastye Moe'

You find out pretty quickly that the title of Schastye Moe (My Joy) is ironic. Every one of the 127 minutes of this Ukrainian movie takes you somewhere hideously bleak, and very slowly indeed. What there is of the plot concerns Georgy (Viktor Nemets), a trucker who gets lost in a small Russian village while on a job. The narrative jumps back, forth and sideways, though, with consecutive reels not only feeling out of sequence, but also as though they've been chucked in from a different movie. If the desire is to unsettle and disorientate, the movie succeeds, but it does so at the expense of pretty much all else.

Early in the film, Georgy picks up an old man who tells him a striking story from the end of the war, shown in flashback. This segment, and the trucker's later attempts to help a young prostitute begin to draw strands and ideas together despite the laborious pacing. But all that swiftly goes out the window as we soon lose track of time, characters, and frankly all sense of what the hell is going on.

There's nothing wrong with playing with the conventions of narrative cinema for stylistic, ideological or creative purposes. Here though, it seems like the basics of storytelling haven't been flouted for any greater end, they've just been ignored in a fit of self-indulgence. Director Sergei Loznitsa is famed for his documentary work, and I can only imagine that he benefits from the discipline and structure of that framework. The only real idea that surfaces with any power is that life is grim and full of dead ends, and that's a statement that's been made a million times before, and in much less tedious ways.



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