Review of The Way Back (2010) by Shiira — 04 Feb 2011

Janusz(Jim Sturges) won't sign the paper, the document which purports him to be a party subversive, an enemy of the Stalinist state. Charged with making critical remarks about the Soviet dictator, the Polish calvary officer knows that by endorsing the charges leveled against him, he'll be sent on a one-way trip to Siberia, no questions asked, so the pen remains on the desk, untouched, next to the death warrant.

The hand is in rebellion; the hand has eyes. It can practically see the snow looming on Janusz's horizon. Siberia, the source of so many Russian jokes about the red days of the former U.S.S.R., in its original context, was obviously no laughing matter.

The administrator, growing ever impatient with the stalemate at hand, expedites the process of obtaining his charge's signature by employing an old totalitarian antic on the railroaded man. A crying woman is shown into the room; his wife, they got to her, and by the tortured look on her face, Janusz knows right away that he better start packing, and even though the accusing words which freely flow from her lips are a mere formality, the husband still can't believe what he's hearing.

Inside the gulag, the cold, cold gulag, situated against the worst that the wilderness has to offer, a prison that offers all the comforts of hell, it would only be natural if Janusz turned into a misogynist, especially when he's selected for mining detail.

The coal mine looks like a place that could change a man. Down in the shaft, the betrayed husband has a vision of home, a fever dream which stops just before his first-person self spies a rock next to the front door.

Although the hallucination looks like a nostalgic projection of longing to resume with an old life as it was, the dream self's fleeting occupation with the rock may indicate a murderous desire to use the seemingly innocuous object as a weapon against the person who sentenced him to oblivion.

This vision, a reoccurring one, demonstrates how, in bypassing the rock, Janusz never allows his hurt feelings to congeal into a deep-seated grudge. Too bad. "The Way Back" could sure use an angry man, but that anger never rises to the surface.

Nothing rises to the surface. Sex and cannibalism is not on the filmmaker's menu. He's a good man, this Janusz, who escapes from the gulag with some other men, also good(the Russian, notwithstanding), perfect gentlemen, as it so happens, when on their journey to escape from the Soviet Union, they encounter a pretty young girl(Sairose Ronan), and none of them, not even Valka(Colin Farrell), who had stabbed a fellow inmate for his sweater, makes a pass at her.

What is this? A film from the nineteen-forties? But even a nun, Ruth from Michael Powell's "Black Narcissus"(1947), also set in the Himalayas, had sex on the brain. The problem with "The Way Back" is that the filmmaker does sexualize the Siberian prisoners, then forgets about their virility, and proceeds to give them blue balls.

If anything, "The Way Back" tries to prove that exposure to pornographic images doesn't necessarily lead to sexual deviancy on the peruser, or the pornographer's part. Back at the gulag, Valka had commissioned an artist named Tamasz(Alexandru Potocean) to do pencil drawings of denuded women, and interestingly enough, it's the pornographer who goes back for Irena, right after they capture and kill an animal trapped in mud.

It's interesting because pornographers are often accused of treating women like meat, but alas, the girl goes unmolested, which means that "The Way Back", in the absence of sexual tension, fills the void with walking and talking, walking and talking, and a lot of starving and dehydration for the duration of its running time.

It didn't have to be that way. When the prisoners reach the Russian border, Valka, the hardlining Communist, decides to remain in the U.S.S.R., which would be perfectly plausible for a man who has Lenin tattooed on his chest, but still, you can't help but shake the feeling that there's a little contrivance at work here, since Valka's removal makes the filmmaker's job of keeping Irena chaste, a whole lot easier.

In Mongolia, en route to the Himalayas, some men on horseback stop the weary travelers and ask Smith(Ed Harris) if she's his wife. "Daughter," replies the American, who, perhaps, had decided on a strictly platonic relationship with the Polish girl back in Russia, where the girl came on to him like a filial daughter, in which she tenderly washed his bloodied foot at a nearby stream.

When the Mongolian inquires about the girl's relationship to Smith, it's virtually the only mention of sex, however oblique, throughout their long and arduous journey.