Review of The Island (2007) by Peter K — 07 Jul 2011

Film of a holy man & hermit in a gray world heavy with sin. The island is located somewhere in Russia's icy White Sea. The biopic directs some well-deserved scrutiny onto Anatoly's title as a "saint.

" Able to see the future, cure wounds & exorcise demons, his occasional jokes make him look crazy & although he is never less than morally upright. It is a backdrop for a study of spiritual crisis that is predictable.

The films monochromatic color palette is also predictable. The prologue, with young, Anatoly Tribuntzev) accidentally shooting his superior, Tikhon (A Zelenski), at the behest of Nazis. When his boat sinks, Anatoly washes ashore on a nearby island, where he builds a cult as a monk with uncanny powers of healing & foresight.

1976, & the older Anatoly (P Mamonov) spends much time crossing the beautiful bleak landscape, asking the Lord Jesus to remove his transgressions, & if it weren't for some telling flashes of humor, this films look at this spiritually miserable monk would be completely wasted.

His faith feels fake but his sense of remorse does not. His interactions with the people who come to him for help give the film added dimension. He advises with equal amounts of sanctimony & humor, suggesting both a conflicted relationship with God but also a need to grapple with boredom.

When he tells a widow that her husband is still alive & that she should slaughter her pig, sell her farm, & move to France to find him, there is a sense that he recognizes his own struggle in hers & that he is lying to her in the interest of ushering her past weeks of ritual of mourning.

Does this mean he resents his service to God? After exorcising a demon from a young woman, a person from Anatoly's past appears, & though the stage seems set for an examination of the man's regret for having wasted his life, director Pavel Lungin has long blown lost the plot on the chilly vistas of the White Sea to care much, & so Anatoly's crisis never feels resolved, simply dissolving into the haze of the film's Orthodox Christian pageantry.