Schastye Moe (My Joy) (eng subs) [2010] Serhiy Loznytsya

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My Joy (2010)

Schastye moe (original title)


http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1646114/

Russian language with hard English subtitles

My Joy (Schastye moyo) is a 2010 Ukrainian drama film directed by Serhiy Loznytsya.

Vlad Ivanov as Major from Moscow
Viktor Nemets as Georgy
Olha Shuvalova as teenage prostitute
Dmitri Gotsdiner as train station Superintendent

The story about a few days in the life of truck driver Georgi seems to be a never-ending nightmare, a spiral of violence and abuses of power. A man goes to work and on his way he is sucked into the everyday madness of his country, losing his health and memory in the process and ends up as a murderer, who calmly lies down to sleep after committing the crime. A dark parable about the situation in deep Russia today.

My Joy, a film that has rigidly divided Russian audiences, according to its director, begins with a plop, a tossed corpse landing in wet cement. Even after its bleak life-is-cheap worldview has been relentlessly confirmed in all of its twisted permutations, the film never fails to surprise. Director Sergei Loznitsa takes his time in setting the mood and then sets off well-timed shocks. (The directorΓΓé¼Γäós documentary background comes in handy. Time-worn extras in one scene cry out for their own movie.) There have been plenty of Russian films irreverently dissecting the countryΓΓé¼Γäós past, but My Joy paints an equally dark picture of the present, where the police at a roadside checkpoint yield immense power and prostitutes pop up anywhere, anytime, which they strangely do in Silent Souls as well. Nothing is sacred, including the veneration of wizened veterans of the Great War.

A young truck driver, Georgi, takes a tortuous shortcut through a rural backwater and his life takes a turn for the worse. This kind of Everyman, lead character, is physically and psychological battered down by a series of humiliating and shocking incidents ΓΓé¼ΓÇ£ particularly at the hands of soldiers and policemen. Spanning both a contemporary and post-Second World War time frame, the film meanders here and there, but all the time descending into a colder, darker place. It's effective ΓΓé¼ΓÇ£ heart-wrenchingly so on occasion - but ΓΓé¼┼ôjoyΓΓé¼┬¥ is in short supply here.