Baffling, unsettling and utterly compelling, Sergei Loznitsa’s first feature, “My Joy,” emerged as one of the standout titles in this year’s Cannes competition. Nevertheless, it went unrewarded — perhaps because no one on the jury knew quite what to make of it. A journey into the darkest reaches of the Russian landscape (and psyche), its tale of a truck driver who takes a wrong turn on a highway choked with stalled cars — only to find himself plunged into a nightmarish world of roadside prostitutes, murderous peasants and corrupt border guards — plays like a lament for a country that has also badly lost its way. Yet rather than make crude didactic points, the film’s wayward narrative slips easily, at times almost unnoticeably, between past and present, as its writer-director leaves it up to the viewer to decipher connections between the atrocities of the Soviet era and the degraded state of Russia today. Ultimately, though, any precise reading remains elusive. What remains with you, at the end, is simply a sense of profound, almost haunted unease. For the former documentarian (best known for 2006’s Siege of Leningrad study “Blockade”), it marks an unusually assured feature debut.
See the full article from “Variety”