Post-apocalypse now! We don't need no stinking zombies. Civilization can collapse by itself, without a disaster to trigger it, and we'll be left in a Hobbesian cesspool of nasty brutishness to equal The Road or Walking Dead*. Maybe we already are. If the Sawyer family (TCM) 's decayed capitalism, or the pack-mentality aggressions of the home invaders from Last House On The Left, became the operating principle for a whole society... well, that would be "Our Goals For A New America," RNP 2016. *EDIT: Digression about Muerte A Sangre Fria deleted.
Given the numbers here -- only 2.9k currently mark this as watched -- this is severely underwatched. Especially since in our current context, for this is the first Ukrainian film (so Wikipedia tells me) that competed for the Palme d'Or.Pardon me for thinking it's distinctly Russian, which it is in setting and language. Nobody does the sour-dregs-of-life fare better, as far as I know, than the Russian artists. And so if I am to sell you on this, it would be that the Coens did a bit of a Kiarastami movie, with shades of "Psycho" and Robert Altman. But I like another description I read better: the Ukrainian-Russian version of "Deliverance." And if you can imagine, this is in the main far worse than "Deliverance." Because of course Russian.I also would've thought the cinephiles around here would like a slow-burn surprising road- picture with a certain throughline plot, that then also blends the intercutting of a WW2 plot with it. Somehow, this movie manages to be both slow and to have a lot going on in it.It starts out as a Kiarastami-esque road thing. A truck driver in the spring is delivering flour on the road, with ample shots of him driving and POV shots of driving down the road. In typical "road" fashion, he gets thwarted and diverted: rude police asking for "papers please!", a crude 18-year-old prostitute, an old WW2 veteran who says he hasn't used his name since the war.All of this probably, arguably, becomes significant. Things happen, slowly but not slowly, that remind me of many a great picture, and yet this is uniquely Russian still. That's partly why I'm surprised this is underwatched: any learned or veteran viewer of American fare from the last 60 years will absolutely see so many famous movies here, none of which I'm sure are being quoted or brought up.I read here reviewers saying that the second half seems "random." In its own way, so does "Psycho," so we're stuck trying to differentiate positive surprise from negative randomness. Is that all dependent on the viewer and their expectations and prior knowledge? I think the more you've seen of the great American movies, the less random this seems. You'll be able to fit "My Joy" into some kind of framework.
