My Joy

                         Viktor Nemets and Olga Shuvalova                     

Sergei Loznitsa's My Joy, released in 2010, is an inscrutable portrait of Russia as a paranoid wasteland. From its first shot, that of a cement mixer being used to help conceal a corpse, the mood of the film is that of unrelenting despair. The film could be dismissed as a Russophobic screed, but it is so teeming with vital storytelling that I was enthralled from start to finish. The film is ostensibly a road film, initially following Georgy (Viktor Nemets), a young trucker as he attempts to make a delivery in Western Russia. The film, however, is extremely discursive. It hurtles through time and space illustrating a host of fragmentary tales. When Georgy is joined temporarily by an old drifter, we view the reminiscences of his attempt to return home after World War 2 and come to learn why he is living a peripatetic life. After the drifter goes off on his own, Georgy is waylaid by three hooligans who assault him. The attack leaves Georgy mute and mad and he spends the rest of the film wandering aimlessly through a pitiless landscape.

The characters who populate My Joy are a murderer's row of ruffians, criminals, teenage prostitutes (an especially scary Olga Shuvalova), and sinister representatives of the government. Every government official in the film, from Soviet intelligence officers during the Great Patriotic war era to road traffic patrolmen in present day Russia, are portrayed as corrupt figures eager to prey on whoever falls into their clutches. Repeated requests to see one's papers become the film's harbingers of doom. If My Joy has a flaw, it is that its narrative is so scattered that it is hard to follow. Despite this caveat, I found the film to be an unflinching triumph.