With Russia in the international cultural dog house thanks to its antics in Ukraine, it might be surprising that this art house film has made such an impact on the festival circuit. But not only are there no martial or nationalist elements in the script, the movie is a generic downer in the Russian fashion, meaning it has absolutely no agenda that could be taken as being political. Director Ilya Povolotsky mostly sticks to the cruddy grey back roads of forlorn vilages that look as if they haven’t seen a visitor since the collapse of the Soviet Union as he chronicles a road trip of an unnamed father (Gela Chitava) and his preternaturally sullen teenage daughter (Maria Lukyanova). 

Their destination is the sea, but their purpose is never fully revealed until they reach it, and even then you may wonder if they had something else in mind. Povolotsky isn’t interested in motivations or even desires. He dwells on disappointment and resentment. For the most part, this pair, who are traveling by means of an aged, rust-colored RV, don’t talk to each other except to extract needed information. The landscape suggests a blighted economy that’s two steps away from Mad Max-level ruin. They buy black market gasoline from shady characters, set up a mobile cinema and sell contraband beer and snacks, and peddle pirated porn DVDs to truckers in parking lots, a pastime that gets them run out of town in at least one instance. The girl highly resents her father’s penchant for truck-stop prostitutes, which don’t seem to cheer him up anyway, and mostly spends her time taking Polaroids of the scenery, which she and Povolotsky capture in all its magnificent decrepitude. Which isn’t to say there isn’t a plot, only that it reveals itself in fits and starts and mostly hangs over the movie like a curse, as if daring you to make sense of it. The girl falls in with an equally morose young biker who stalks the caravan and takes advantage of her enmity toward her father, but to say there’s any love between the two would be assuming too much from a movie where the most consequential occurrence is when the police turn the RV back from a seaside road because of a “fish plague” that Povolotsky is gracious enough to visualize for us. 

For the first half of the film I thought the story might actually be taking place during the Soviet era, but then a cell phone shows up and a laptop figures centrally in the latter half of the story. The bleak visuals have a timeless quality that draws you in, conveying a mysterious nostalgia for something you have no memory of but can still feel. It’s a haunting movie of restless pans and dollies, populated with pale, skinny ghosts who seem to have never had the chance to live anything that could be called a satisfactory life, which sort of matches my prejudices about Russia.

In Russian. Now playing in Tokyo at Theater Image Forum Aoyama (03-5766-0114).

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