A Gentle Creature (КРОТКАЯ). 2017. France/Germany/Lithuania. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. DCP courtesy The Festival Agency. In Russian; English subtitles. 143 min.
Sergei Loznitsa’s A Gentle Creature premiered in the main competition at Cannes in 2017, the year that also marked the centenary of the Russian Revolution. The film follows a woman on a strange and absurdist journey to discover the fate of her husband, who has been languishing in a Russian prison on false charges of murder. As in Loznitsa’s Two Prosecutors, the plot is set in motion by the arrival of a strange parcel, in this case one marked “return to sender,” as if her husband has vanished without a trace. Based on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1876 short story of the same name—a story the filmmakers Robert Bresson and Mani Kaul were inspired to adapt in similarly loose and imaginative ways—this is the character sketch of a woman who encounters nothing but bitter resignation and spite, the vision of a society grown too accustomed to the brevity and brutality of their Hobbesian existence. Vasilina Makovtseva’s remarkable, unsmiling performance is a study in obdurate will, making the film’s climax, with its echoes of Franz Kafka’s novel Amerika and Loznitsa’s earlier film The Halt, that much more shattering. As Dostoevsky, writing in the voice of his gentle creature, concludes, “But scales hung before me and obscured my mind. Fateful, terrible scales! How did it come about that all this fell from my eyes, that all of a sudden I saw the light and understood everything?”