31ST HAUL

Watch out, a road movie: will Vitalik and Yuri, whose hands are dirtied as much by the oil sludge as by the mud in which their trucking tank is stuck, get to their destination? This fine team, not lacking in resourcefulness (one of them greases a tank part with mayonnaise), is not on its way to some war against a separatist State or to a military camp, but to the Kamchatka village grocery, which is awaiting the replenishment of its supplies. This opening in the mid-action certainly has a slapstick side, but the retirees of the poverty-ridden peatlands barely surviving on the bread delivered weekly by the green truck in Sergey Dvortsevoy’s Bread Day (1998), or the wandering trucker in Sergei Loznitsa’s My Joy (2010) have preceded this film and temper its comic vein. Denis Klebleev soon enters into the more intimate life of the two truckers: one, who is the companion of woman owner of the small transport firm, half-confesses that he is a professional parasite, while the other does his best to hide a hyper-sensitivity under his cruelly macho behaviour. Sexuality, family, money, human relationships seem to be overheated and the outside world, annihilated. All that remains is to drive off again into the night. (Charlotte Garson)