My Joy

My Joy, a 2010 film by Sergei Loznitsa, reinforces my belief that Russia must be the most depressing country in the world to live in. At least that's the way its depicted in movies. And, judging by My Joy, it's also one of the cruelest. The title is completely ironic--there's no joy to be found.

It begins with a body being flung into a hole, covered in mud, and then the hole is filled in with a bulldozer. We never return to this scene to learn who the unlucky interree is, but its casual disrespect for life is established. The film then centers on a truck driver, Viktor Nemets. He undergoes something of a banal odyssey: he is stopped at a police checkpoint, picks up an old man, who tells him a story of cruelty from the war; gets stuck in a traffic jam (perhaps shades of Godard's Weekend) and then picks up a teenage prostitute, who shows him a way around the tie-up.

She fully expects to ply her trade, and when he offers her money without recompense she is insulted, flinging the money in his face. He is now lost in a strange village, with the kind of faces seen in nightmares. He follows a dirt road until he stops for the night, where he is set upon by robbers, who end up knocking him out with a stick.

Then the film shifts, and I'm embarrassed to say I missed something critical. The focus point of the second half of the movie is a mute, but it wasn't until I went back and read a review in the New York Times that I found out the mute is actually the truck driver, now an amnesiac (with a full beard). I had thought he was the mute who was tagging along with the robbers, especially after a scene in which a young boy witnesses the murder of his father by Russian soldiers during the war.

That aside, the film is slow and grueling and bleak. There isn't a lot of action, but it leads up to a devastatingly brutal scene at that police checkpoint. If we are to learn anything from the movie, or from Lozitsna's world view, is that you can't trust anybody, and you'll get killed if you. There are no Kumbaya moments in My Joy.