Often a film filled with overwhelming drudgery can be cured of its sickening length by re-writes or skilled editing. One of the greatest aspects of the filmmaking process is the drive, from everyone involved, to refine and improve the product. But this appears to be absent from A Gentle Creature, the second dip into fiction-filmmaking from documentarian Sergei Loznitsa.

The film follows an unnamed Russian woman (Vasilina Makovtseva), whose husband is locked up in a Siberian jail for reasons never made entirely clear. She sends a care package to him, which is promptly sent back without explanation. Thus begins her stretched odyssey into the bureaucratic alleyways of a weird Russian society, deeply listening to other people’s harrowing experiences and plunging into strange and troubling nightmares – all to deliver the package, and to maybe even see her husband.

A Gentle Creature

The film starts in the slow, picturesque manner that many great Russian movies do – especially those by Andrei Tarkovsky – with long visuals of wide countryside and disheveled houses. And, despite being a loose adaptation of his short story, you can sense the presence of Dostoyevsky in every scene. The unhelpful, irritable, and sometimes violent examples of bureaucracy have to be silently endured by the unnamed woman – who often has to fill out forms that are never successful or even looked at – elegantly holding that Dostoyevskian (as well as Kafkaesque) tone.

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However, this tension is deflated by Loznitsa’s excessive dialogues and monologues from characters telling their own tales of hardship under a quietly oppressive society. This is exciting at first, particularly during an early scene on a bus where the dialogue drifts and expands among the passengers – an absurd and brilliant scene in its own right. You hope these scenes will develop into a Sorkinese or Tarantino-esque style of wordiness, possessing the power to thrill. But once you reach the six or seventh life story told by one of many brief or recurring characters, the film grows into a drag. We get the point, but Loznitsa labours it into boredom.

His over-indulgent writing is translucently dressed in excellent direction and Oleg Mutu’s heavy and haunting cinematography. There is a fear of cutting, which doesn’t benefit the dialogue but creates a constant intrigue with the visuals. Every shot has its own narrative, often moving with three acts, and still has the power to surprise after two-and-a-half hours. This is a movie that should’ve been looked at rather than listened to.

 

Makovtseva’s central performance is heavily repressed, in keeping with her quiet and introverted character (hence the title of the film). And despite the unchanging gloom in her expression, she provides tiny indicative details into the character’s thoughts and feelings. There is a hard naturalism to it, so softly performed.

A Gentle Creature is often intriguing and you’ll want to pursue to the end, but it’s stuttered by bloated dialogue – making the film at least half-an-hour longer than it should be. There’s a scene towards the end so crammed with speeches that it could be used as a form of political torture. None of these characters are as interesting as our unnamed woman, so you have to wonder: why does Loznitsa find these stories so much more enticing than those untold by his gentle creature?

A Gentle Creature is released in the UK on 13th April 2018

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A Gentle Creature
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After completing a degree in Film Production & Cinematography, Euan turned to film journalism. He prefers lesser-known indies to blockbuster bonanzas, but delights in anything different from the norm.
gentle-creature-reviewA Gentle Creature is often intriguing and you’ll want to pursue to the end, but it’s stuttered by bloated dialogue – making the film at least half-an-hour longer than it should be.