Critics reviews

Part of the trick of Loznitsa’s nightmarish, black-comic assembly of bureaucratic and brute horrors in contemporary Russia is to keep us guessing how much it’s a realistic depiction . . . and how much of it is grotesque exaggeration and satire, until these ambiguities eventually give way to the heroine’s own literal nightmare as a summation.

Shot in the ultra-wide 2.66:1 ratio (last seen in, of all things, Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, 2015), A Gentle Creature demonstrates Loznitsa’s impeccably rigorous knack for diorama staging and impeccable choreography, keeping his aesthetic verve in the face of atrocity.

A Gentle Creature is a hell of infinitely repeated rapes for its protagonist, an unnamed woman played by Vasilina Makovsteva in present day Russia. Taking its name and inspiration from a Dostoyevsky novella, A Gentle Creature is as tediously grim as you’d expect.

Vasilina Makovtseva is as quietly beautiful as Dominique Sanda and she exudes a similar, magic radiance even at the moment of her defeat. Through the fable of a woman looking for her incarcerated husband, Loznitza returns to his topic of choice: an evocation, bordering on the improbable and the surreal, of a long-time malaise in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Loznitsa’s consistent movements between the apparent documentation of the “real” in non-fiction and the semblance of the real in the façade of a fictional universe bewilders everyone familiar with his canon, as he seems incorruptible, unperturbed by the onslaught of the festival circuit.

What really lingers is Losnitza's skill as choreographer: Many of his scenes consist of long single takes starting from a seemingly innocuous in-point and slowly jostling both audience and heroine into the next phase of this punishing environment but never stopping the film's flow to scream "bravura set piece." The effect is enveloping, naturalistic, yet claustrophobic.

It's more of a destabilizing shock to the system than a call to arms, a confrontation with a broken state rather than a blueprint to rebuild it. It confirms Loznitsa as a master craftsman of the impeccably designed and crafted hellscape, politically charged and all-consuming. Although he takes a bombastic route to a horrific finale, it's often the muted, wordless scenes that linger the most in the mind.

Admittedly, one film that kept my eyes wide open might well fall into the category of cruel and unusual experiments. But Sergei Loznitsa gives his latest work, A Gentle Creature, a rude (in every sense) chaotic energy and a lunatic desperation that's grimly comic when not stomach-churning.

Among the highlights of the festival, Russian films featured prominently. Indeed, on the basis of the evidence at Cannes, if there is any nation that is still capable of producing resolutely cinematic works, it is the land that, one hundred years ago, was consumed in a revolutionary storm the effects of which we can still feel today.

It's at once Losnitza's most furiously pitched and painstakingly constructed work to date, moving ahead with an appropriately methodical rigor even as it reaches heights of hallucinogenic madness in its final stretch. It's a sobering and troubling vision, rendered in vivid strokes by a consummate thinker and master craftsman.

Deftly weaving between politically ambitious documentary projects and brooding, chunky dramas exploring the malignant side of Russian society, Ukraianian director Sergei Loznitsa follows Austerlitz, last year's documentary on concentration camp tourism, with the fictional A Gentle Creature, an impressively morose, dense, and totalizing immersion into the dehumanizing absurdity of the Russian prison system.

Unequivocally one of the toughest, darkest and longest movies playing in competition... It's about as strange, perplexing and foreign an experience as any I've had at the Festival de Cannes, and the reasons that will limit its commercial viability are the very reasons that you should seek it out, if and when it arrives in your local art-house theater.