Grace

Film - 2023

5,0

9.1K

Grace it's a movie with Maria Lukyanova, Gela Chitava, Eldar Safikanov, Kseniya Kutepova, Aleksandr Cherednik Full cast. Directed by Ilya Povolotsky. Original title Blazh, runtime 119 minutes. Genre Drama.

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Review of

Riccardo Simoncini

An atypical road movie aboard a beat-up van in which father and daughter (with unspecified names) spend their entire lives, wandering in nothingness, moving without ever reaching any destination, there in the most remote regions of southern Russia where everything is identical to itself, brutal desolation on the brink perhaps of a summerless apocalypse in which the fish die one after the other. In the stages of their useless wandering they set up a traveling and itinerant cinema, an open-air screen to which the (few) desperate locals flock, faced with the ruthless indifference of the most extreme poverty, to escape from a widespread boredom even in the children themselves, who dream in vain of going to play on the rides in the city from which everything comes when needed. For the rest there is nothing, between the prairies and the steppe, even the stars are simple projections on the ceiling of a toy planetary sphere, there is no future ("it's a paradox, right? Knowing the future makes it inevitable" says the father), only languages, dialects and vernacular expressions that intersect in the topographical nothingness between the distorted and overlapping radio frequencies. The debut of Ilya Povolotsky, already a documentary filmmaker, however, turns out to be more of a soporific declaration of love to Sokurov, Tarkovsky and Béla Tarr than to the cinema he is trying to make, it would like to be experiential and sensorial, but it completely lacks a narrative structure, thematic and even perceptive that can support it. What they managed to do masterfully with different degrees of experimentation from Reygadas (with his disturbing Post Tenebras Lux) to the recent A Russian Youth (here reviewed by the undersigned, the story of a child soldier too candid for the First World War) up to to the very Italian Una exterminata Domenica (anti-narrative at its extreme), but also simply that Oscar-winning Nomadland that everything revolved around the uninhabited human wandering. Grace definitely stands out Read all

plot

In Russia, an introverted father and his teenage daughter live on the road in a van that contains their entire life, including the equipment for a travelling cinema: the source of their meager income. Povolotsky builds on the undeniable art of the long take, on both the scale of the imposing landscapes and the tight interior of their cramped vehicle. The nameless father and daughter rove around the extremities of their vast country, from south to north. On its margins, the pulse of independent drifters who endure and resist.