NYFF 2010: MY JOY Review

[Our thanks to Aaron Krasnov for the following review.]

"No friendship here," gestures a questionably aged prostitute as she adjusts her small frame to the cab of a patron's truck. Together they wait in stalled traffic, sharing sandwiches and coffee, the young girl's admonition at once a commentary on the competition who walks the stretch of highway and a greater portent of humanity's future as told by Belarusian director Sergei Loznitsa. Previously a documentarian, Loznitsa spent the greater portion of a decade examining the lives of others, collecting a quilt of stories later to be used in his feature debut; a fatalistic examination of the human spirit.

"This is not a road, this is a direction and an accursed one at that," the words mumbled by a would be larcenist and vagabond, apprehended mid robbery and later asked for directions.  Again the words portend a greater prophetic despair and foreshadow the futility of friendship among thieves. 

Filled with allegory, life-story and fantasy My Joy uses Loznitsa's version of Russia as a model to address general humanitarian concerns, those being that we are all assholes and the world is more or less fucked. I would add to this, unless we do something about it, but the film never explicitly asks or makes reference to the possibility of good. I suppose this is where we step in and say 'hey, I'm not like that, let's make a difference', yet the film's views are so hyperbolically gloom-ridden that the impetus for this type of proactivity doesn't appear.

"Everything bad comes from people meddling," a genial trucker monologues to his shuffling near catatonic passenger as they approach a narratively circuitous wayside police station, which holds as you might guess, a situation in which meddling leads to a good deal of bad, for everyone involved. But hey, they meddled, and in a film where one cannot escape their own linguistic augur this is to be expected.

Declaring its intentions from the beginning, a body is dragged through the dirt and thrown into a pit, this, one of many shots of unconscious, possibly dead bodies being dragged through muck.  Followed shortly after by a man, Georgy, our existential narrative escort, leaving an apartment without speaking to a woman who spent the night sleeping on the sofa, her pained face gazing forlorn out the window.