Roads to Koktebel

Youthful dreams and desperate realities . . .
This Russian road movie finds a father and 11-year-old son traveling hundreds of miles on foot from Moscow to a village on the Black Sea. The pace is slow and hypnotic; the situation is unpromising. They are out of money and the season is turning gradually toward winter. The storyline itself is elliptical and relies little if it at all on exposition. We simply watch as the two trudge onward, under leaden skies and across rain-swept distances, depending on the kindness of strangers. The boy, worldly wise beyond his years and distrusting his father, dreams of flight and wind sailing. He has a mysterious sort of second sight that permits him to see himself and his surroundings from high above. Meanwhile, earthbound, the camera follows the two of them across endless sodden, forlorn landscapes.

The people they meet along the way are often little better off than they are, living in a kind of defeated ennui, making do, getting by, lonely, and often sustained by alcohol. One man...

Pleasant Russian road movie
A pleasant enough road movie, about a divorced man (or widowed, I don't remember) going with his young son from Moscow to the Crimea. He's an aeronautical engineer who has been fired and has hit the bad times (maybe with the recovery of Russia's economy under Putin, the argument is slightly out of date). We see them traveling through the countryside in a dilapidated train, and through the bad roads of Western Russia and Eastern Ukraine. Nothing much happens, but before reaching the Black Sea they stop at small towns, where they offer to repair the roof to a house where a mean old man lives, meet a pretty young doctor, etc. Some reviews I read wrote about the pair traveling through the desolate steppes of the former Soviet Union, yet this is some of the most fertile and densely populated part of that country. The pace is slow, though not terribly so, compared with traditional Russian cinema. And the characters seem real people, even if the plot is slightly farfetched. Reccommended.

Much more then just a 'road movie'
A father and his 11 year old son embark on a journey across Russia to reach Koktebel, the Ukrainian seaside town. With no money they hop on trains and rely on 'kindness of strangers', who at times are not that kind at all.

Through a series of unexpected events, we see how their relationship if affected by quite often the opposite stands they take, but at the same time the support and warmth they have for each other.

This is a very emotional journey in the depth of family bonds and self-discovery.

Gleb Puskepalis (son of Sergei Puskepalis, star of Popogrebsky's later film Simple Things and Zvyagintsev's The Banishment) is excellent and very moving in his role of the son.

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