After receiving an unexpected visit from his mysteriously injured brother Mark, Alex decides to take his family back to the country home of his childhood, but once there, Alex's wife Vera confesses...
The Banishment grants an expulsion of familial melodrama before ensuing tragedy. Estrangement. The antipathy that can manifest in the strongest of bonds. Emotively ruptured by natural progression or artificial intervention. Spouses who reside with each other for a long period of time can always notice changes. Behavioural alterations that enable self-questioning and doubt to override the mind. Is this man today, the man I fell in love with years ago? Has time forced us to become “strangers”? Zvyagintsev exhibits his inner Tarkovsky, paying homage to his legendary style of directing, to convey paranoia and guilt residing within a withering relationship. Alex, a father of two, is forced to confront his wife Vera who is pregnant with another man’s baby.
Having temporarily moved his family to his childhood home in rural Russia, the tranquility of the countryside landscape is shattered when the traumatic news is broken to him. Lost of trust. Paranoia. Depression. Heightened states swarmed Alex’s mind, searching for the appropriate way to respond. Confiding in his recently injured brother, whom embraces criminal affiliations, to seek the prime reaction. Through Lavronenko’s exceptionally disorientated performance, a distant sense of melancholia shrouded the glistening hills. Vera, purposefully neutral in direction due to Bonnevie’s intelligent stance, patiently waiting for Alex’s response. A conversation? Therapy? Domestic violence? Murder?
Regardless, Zvyagintsev’s intention wasn’t to produce a twisted drama. It was to depict the disintegration of a relationship. The inability to communicate, and how a consequence of that incapacity is guilt. Vera never looked guilty for her actions, subtly smiling after confessing. Then tragedy strikes. The implication of culpability is reversed, with Alex now symbolising its manifestation. Testing the strength of masculinity amidst the peril of emotional vulnerability. Zvyagintsev seamlessly transfers this emotion from both individuals and illustrates a difference in betrayal.
It’s yet another depiction of familial woes that exhumes a bleak aura of soul-destroying depression. However, unlike his previous film, Zvyagintsev inflicts ambiguity and an unsteady structure upon its story. The long, pandering shots that linger after characters exit the scene exemplifies the homage to Tarkovsky, an obvious inspiration for Zvyagintsev. Its pace is methodically slow, requiring an extraordinary amount of patience throughout its near three-hour runtime. Scenes involving the couple’s children frolicking in the surrounding grassland become unnecessarily overstretched, adding little to no substance to the character interactions. This becomes more apparent when Kir and Eva are discarded for the last hour, offering no alternate insight to the tragedy that occurs. The climactic flashback, so seamlessly transitioned from present to past that I did not notice immediately, was clumsily embedded to provide answers that Zvyagintsev’s ambiguity was already alluding to. Unfortunately juxtaposing the intellectual approach that preceded it. Zvyagintsev does however intelligently reverse the introductory shots throughout the city and utilise them for the ending sequences, personifying the indication of closure from this circle of torment. And he does embed a vast amount of spectacular shots from Krichman’s cinematography. So many, that we’d be here all day analysing each one!
The beauty of The Banishment is with its meticulously deliberate pace. Allowing the onscreen estrangement to percolate, trickling its sorrow through the oblique Russian architecture. Yet its also the feature’s curse, with Zvyagintsev prolonging a story that would’ve benefited from a stronger structure. Regardless, The Banishment is a reminder. It reminds us that we as humans need to talk. Otherwise, we lose everything.
