MY JOY (SCHASTYE MOE)

Germany, 2010, 127 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa.

Two hours of joyless slices of fairly savage Russian life. The director, who has a documentary background, says that he intended a more sentimental initial story and his title, My Joy, was for that tale. When he cut that and turned grim, he kept the title, with the under-understatement that it was ironic.

He also speaks of his pallette, which may be the best way to interpret the succession of stories which don’t necessarily follow each other but are juxtaposed like colours on the pallette. Most of the stories are in the present, set in the area south of Moscow, stories of truck drivers, thieves (plenty of these), prostitutes, corrupt police, soldiers, people going mad. The two flashback stories to the end of Waorld War II have a stronger narrative thrust and are, to those of us who like stories, more dramatically satisfying though emotionally straining: a soldier robbed by a superior office, then a pacifist schoolteacher robbed and brutalised by the soldiers returning from the German front, to whom he had given hospitality.

The film opens with a corpse being buried under concrete – the foundations of contemporary rebuilding of Russia symbolised as murderous? In fact, corpses seem to bring to a close several of the stories, with five at the very end. Aesthetic joy, perhaps, but little emotional joy in My Joy.

1. The impact of the film? Russian storytelling? A palette of stories?

2. The director and his documentary background, his travels in Russia and collecting these stories? A German production, filmed in Ukraine?

3. The locations, countryside, fields and forests, tracks and highways, the roadblocks, the towns, houses, isolation? Musical score?

4. The flashbacks to the end of World War Two, the railway station, the story and the house?

5. Russia, its character, soul, soullessness, exploitation, robbing and killing? Goodness defeated?

6. The title and its irony?

7. The opening, the corpse, the mixing of the cement, the corpse buried in the foundation of the building? Symbolic?

8. The story of the driver, his wife at home silent, his being held up by the roadblock, the police and their taking the woman inside? His taking his documents and leaving? The hitchhiker in the car, his story in the flashback? The questions? The accident, the line of traffic in the town, the prostitutes, the young girl, the driver helping her, her resentment? Going along the side road, in the field, asleep, the intruders, eating with them, the mute, their greed, killing the driver, discovering the load was only flour and useless for them?

9. The modern house, the woman and her work, cooking, the visitor?

10. The past: the teacher, the soldiers coming from Germany, his offering hospitality, his ideas about culture and teaching, his young son, his dead wife? The soldiers murdering him, robbing him, leaving the boy outside?

11. The soldiers and the old man, the coffin, the hallucination of the hanged man? The old man in the house, his caution, offering the drink? The shootings?

12. The man in the house, madness, his being picked up on the road, the chatty driver? The roadblock, the same police again? The couple, the police taking them in, the violence despite his being a policeman and a major? The driver and his passenger as witnesses, being forced to sign the documents? Their bashing the major? The man and his madness, shooting them all?

13. A nihilistic and ironic film?