Thanks to our Netflix subscription, last night we watched Vozvrashcheniye (The Return) on DVD. Andrei Zvyagintsev's 2003 drama was memorable, and very Russian in feeling and mentality. Lots of suffering. Clearly allegorical. Good photography. Sad ending, made even sadder by the knowledge that actor Vladimir Garin drowned shortly after filming was completed.
American and British reviews via the IMDB link seemed to take the film as a story of a troubled father-son relationship, and a coming-of-age saga. Having lived in Russia, it seemed to me that the spare allegorical style probably was something more, something that Russians might understand at once, that I didn't quite get.
The plot is terribly simple. After a 12-year absence, a father returns to his family. He takes them on a fishing trip to a deserted island many miles from home. The natural landscape is beautiful, but the human one is not. The father digs up a buried treasure in an abandonded building. Trouble and tragedy follow. The end.
What did it mean?
None of the reviews mentioned it, but I wondered: Could the desert island have been one of the Solovetsky islands, location of the notorious Solovki prison camp the mother of the GULAG, according to Solzhenitsyn? Known as SLON, the Solovki prison camp was in use from 1923 to 1939. No one can say for sure exactly how many died.
Nowadays the location is a tourist site. Might the father in have been a returning prisoner who wanted to show his children where he had been, and what he had endured? Rebecca Santana's 2002 visit to the camp for the Voice of America seems to match the plot of the film. Beatings, arbitrary authority, left standing in the soaking rain, all take place in the father-son story--just as they did in the prison.
The boy is left soaking in the rain on a bridge over a canal. Could this be the infamous White Sea Canal, a slave labor project originally named after Stalin? Even the towers in the film remind one of prison watchtowers. And the events that take place are similar to those described in this account by Gregg Zoroya
Tour guide Olga Vostriakova says about Solovetsky: "Probably, this is a place where evil things and good things are connected together."
Nowhere is that more true than on Sekirnaya Hill, several miles north of the monastery. When the religious center was wealthy and flourishing in the 1800s, the Russian Orthodox monks built a two-story wooden chapel with a lighthouse in the tower on this highest point of land.
Today, the chapel survives, weathered and peaceful on a grassy summit where goats graze. But it is no longer a symbol of good tidings.
The Bolsheviks made it a punishment center for the gulag. Thugs who doubled as prison guards -- many of them criminals given greater authority than political prisoners -- practiced sadistic forms of torture. They would strip prisoners naked and stake them out where mosquitoes could feast. Or they would force prisoners to balance all day on horizontal poles running across the chapel at a level too high for feet to touch the ground. Those who fell were beaten or, worse, strapped lengthwise to a heavy beam and rolled down a steep portion of the hill, more than 200 feet to the bottom. It was a death sentence.
"The laws of the underworld became the camp standard," says the narrator of a 1988 Russian documentary, Solovki Power.
Would a former prisoner really return to visit the place of his incarceration? Santana's story suggests the answer is yes:
She recalls that one day a man came into her office and started looking around. When Ms. Shopkina asked if he needed help, he replied that he simply wanted to see the room where he lived as a prisoner.
