A body is pushed in a ditch, a mixer-full of cement splashed on top. A bulldozer finishes the operation, rolling its tracks over the anonymous man’s anonymous grave, returning him to the ground, for unto dust we shall all return. After this, our protagonist, a truck driver called Georgy, drives along a scenic road while a schlager about war sacrifices plays on the radio, instantly bringing to mind Aleksei Balabanov (1959–2013), whose films featured nasty bursts of repressed violence. Loznitsa’s fiction debut advances with time jumps, yet intuitively smoothly intertwines into a cohesive whole, bearing a kinship to the oeuvre of Alain Resnais, who also started as a documentarian.
My Joy was filmed in Ukraine and features Russian dialogue. This road movie gradually picking up horror elements is a provocation, a journey into Russianness pieced together from real stories, its brutal Soviet past oozing cold sweat through decades to the present day. From the start, an ominous atmosphere fills the air at a police checkpoint – perhaps real, perhaps not.
Georgy’s journey continues, and the characters appearing from the roadside to hitch a ride lead him on a chilling tour into the visionless and timelessly stagnant mental landscape. The story is already metaphorically laid out in the introduction: the anonymous dead is a part of the common land, the common history – the common nightmare.
Mia Öhman