I have just seen this film at the Renoir in London, and found much to enjoy. At first the basic story-line of the father looking for a haven and the boy for a world of adventure and freedom, seemed slow-moving but the early long takes gave the viewer time to absorb the landscape and the point-of-view, in particular the boy's slow awakening to the reality of his situation. His ability to 'see everything from above', demonstrated to the forest-dwelling girl early in the film when he drew a map of a terrain unknown to him, was an early signal of his superior grasp of reality and an introduction to the main metaphorical cluster of the film. The use of birds, glider and flying-paper imagery rang the changes on the visual representation of the boy's yearnings; a galaxy of Dostoyevsian larger-than-life and twice-as-unpredictable Russian characters met along the way added intrigue and ethnic authenticity to the story-line. The bizarre minor characters contrasted with the down-to-earth ordinariness of the tensions between the father and son. Their habitats were astonishing and yet completely acceptable within the heightened realism established in the early scenes - the railworker's shed with the lavatory doubling as a vodka store - the tumble-down mansion whose roof the father stayed to repair with disastrous consequences, the hillside ox-roast with flying sparks visible for miles and a suddenly-looming lorry-driver big as Brian Blessed hefting the boy across his shoulders with a triumphant cry of 'Meat! and a chill echo of 'Texas Chain Saw '.The Amazonian, silent 'Xenia', for all her 'sweatiness' complained of by the boy, was given a similarly apocryphal persona. All were separated by muddy fields and clawing shrubland which the camera allowed us to experience as visually alienating at a distance and unbearably uncomfortable up close. Questions raised were as much about Russian geography and history as about the central relationship and its outcome. By the end, the mention of 'Koktebel', whose very absence from the atlas referred to a historical shift in identity, carried the resonance of Chekhov's 'Moscow', in his masterpiece about longing and nostalgia, 'Three Sisters'. At the end of the film, when the uncertain pleasures of routine existence versus an ungraspable freedom had been clearly delineated, the binding ties of father and son remained as unresolved and problematic as at the beginning. Like the evenly-matched wrestlers in the hillside firelight, they were forced to declare an uneasy truce.
Review of Koktebel
