Pamfir review – disturbing, occult thriller as Ukrainian smuggler returns home – The Guardian
This film from western Ukraine is without doubt one of the strangest and fiercest I’ve seen shortly: dynamic and but despairing. It doesn’t allude to Russia’s battle on Ukraine, however maybe that battle is there subtextually, within the sense of tribal loyalty, neighborhood custom and the distinct, virtually occult pull in the direction of the west. There’s something of Aleksey German or Sergey Loznitsa right here, and its lead character is sort of a extra watchful and subdued, although no much less violent, model of somebody that Emir Kusturica would dream up.
The setting is Bukovina, within the jap Carpathian mountains bordering Romania. Oleksandr Yatsentyuk performs Leonid, nicknamed Pamfir (“Stone”), a man who has simply come house from a job in Poland; he makes passionate like to his spouse Olena (Solomiia Kyrykova) after which settles fortunately again right down to household life together with his son Nazar (Stanislav Potiak), who has evidently grown from his teen years to maturity whereas Leonid’s been away. Leonid is trying ahead to the native Malanka pageant, a faintly sinister, pagan affair of masks and straw capes; with none issue Leonid additionally resumes his common his job as a water-diviner, detecting websites and digging wells.
However there are issues. He has a tense relationship together with his father, whom he really blinded in a single eye after a fistfight, and in addition with the church; his spouse is religious and really insistent that Nazar ought to be a part of the choir. Leonid himself has requested the native priest there to signal his numerous employment papers, which he leaves with him within the church. However a prank by Nazar ends with the church burning down and Leonid feels honour certain to pay for it to be rebuilt. So he has no alternative however to renew his darkish vocation: smuggling cigarettes and prescribed drugs via the forest to Romania. However it will significantly annoy the native gangster and horrendously corrupt forestry commissioner Oreste (Petro Chychuk), on whose turf he’s trespassing.
There’s something nightmarish and hallucinatory about this enterprise and in addition within the horrible retribution exacted by Oreste, a grotesque mob chieftain. The movie has a throb of one thing disturbing and transgressive.
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