The Return, a later version, in Russian, reworked, appeared in 2003 and is available on Netflix in the foreign film section. Easily accessible, you can stream by pushing a button.
The film could have been shot in black and white. If there is a musical score, it passes in and out of your ears without memory. The sounds you remember are the natural sounds of nature: a hatchet chopping wood, water splashing against a shore, and the pull of the oars through water. Nature sounds.
When the “father” returns after 12 years, he meets near total silence. The wife says fewer than 50 words in the film, the husband less than 200. The two sons, Andrei and Ivan, do all the talking and all the speculating.
So what can such a film be about that makes it worth 90 minutes of our time? The focus centers on the boys—on their relationship and on their coming to grips with the “lost” father. We watch them and listen to them respond to him while on a failed fishing trip. They visit an island instead. Apparently, he has bigger fish to fry, but he says off-handedly that he “doesn’t like fish.” What gives?
The hints about who he was and where he went come through the sons. But don’t look for anything overt. Their world is covered in clouds and mist, appropriate symbols, the shroud that covers the father’s identity.
What, then, is the larger meaning here? One theme explores anxiety separation. What happens to children when the father leaves? He may not be Russian Special Ops or a criminal [there are hints]. Social scientists tell us the single most traumatic event in a child’s life is loss of the father—for any reasons.
Both Ivan and Andrei are losing their moorings when the film opens. They are living dangerously. Secondly, where is the communication in this family, and what does the film teach us about talking to each other? The aunt does not speak at all. At their first breakfast, the father merely says “hello.”
A third, deeper possibility, is the Freudian notion of “the search for the father.” For Freud, an atheist, who did not go deeply enough and religiously enough, missed the point. On the emotional-psychological level, there is that ongoing search for a/The Father. Lose him and you have a vacuum to fill, which creates Freud’s laundry list of childhood traumas, some of them sexual in nature.
But I reject Freud here and seek a deeper religious answer. Yes, we seek The Father, the Father of us all. That core archetype is where our meaning and fulfillment lie. Our spiritual journey is an effort to return to The Father---a road of trials, a yoke both heavy and light to bear. The paradox depends on what kind of day you’re having. As my granddaughter, Ashley says, “it’s all in the journey.”
Finally, perhaps the film helps us examine in a displaced way the trauma children feel when parents who separate come back together. Perhaps, it dramatizes the return of the father from Iraq or prison or desertion from the family itself.
In any case, the father’s inscrutability, the vague, even fragile replacement by the aunt and the mother, and the growing Cain and Abel animosity between the brothers leaves us with a breach that does not close in the film.
Can we bridge such emotional gaps in our own lives? A returning college student for Christmas experiences the readjustment to what he was and what he has become in 15 short weeks.
Or what of the LDS missionary who attempts to transition from Mexico City to Simi Valley, California? Things have changed. Perhaps the “girl” is gone and the wounds are deep. And perhaps as so-called adults, we take that very pain too lightly. Finally, there is the returning serviceman.
Can you set up an outpost, say, Restrepo [a famous documentary now on Netflix] and be the same? A Dutch documentary [also on Netflix] follows a squad of 12 men to Afghanistan, to what they collectively call, “The Hellhole of the world.”
They arrive home: one dead, three wounded. Within a year, 8 of the original 12 returned to Afghanistan. One fair-haired Dutchman asks, "How can Holland now make use of a man who can only fire an M-60 machine gun?"
Yes, departures are hard. Are returns any easier?
