“Sergei Loznitsa’s documentaries are conceived as silent commentary,” begins Jay Weissberg in Variety. “His rigorously edited, coolly composed shots contain all the information needed for viewers to feel the weight of his argument. By contrast, his fiction films (My Joy, In the Fog) play with storytelling in a freewheeling way, combining narrative and cinematic audacity in scenes that shift from the sublime to the phantasmagoric. After five years of canonical nonfiction from the director, it’s something of a shock to watch A Gentle Creature, a dense, nightmarish feature that takes aim at Russia’s befouled soul, in which a nameless woman [Vasilina Makovetseva] tries to learn why the package she mailed to her prisoner husband was returned without explanation.”
“Discovering relatively quickly that this was no simple administrative snafu, the woman then gives herself over to the pimps and racketeers in the hope that she’ll somehow find her answer,” writes David Jenkins at Little White Lies. “She seems utterly untroubled by danger, constantly handing over her passport to random tyrants who claim to want to help her (even though she’s been hoodwinked over and over again). She goes deeper and deeper down this festering rabbit hole, and all you want her do to is get back on the train, go back to her country shack and play with her dog. This inevitably makes for dreary and punishing cinema.”
“Powerful though bloated, A Gentle Creature is a companion to Loznitsa’s phenomenal first narrative feature, My Joy,” writes Giovanni Marchini Camia at the Film Stage. “Though not as successful as its predecessor, Loznitsa’s latest nonetheless confirms the director’s place of honor amongst cinema’s most vociferous critics of Putin’s kingdom. . . . Were it not for the redundant dream sequence that takes up A Gentle Creature’s final half-hour and completely derails the film, Loznitsa may well have pulled off a masterpiece—if a supremely unpleasant one at that.”
This is “a 143-minute odyssey of frustration and despair, featuring maybe 100 speaking roles, and expressing a pessimism so thick it makes last week’s fellow Cannes competitor Loveless look like cornball wish-fulfillment by comparison,” writes A. A. Dowd at the A.V. Club. “In its endlessly repeating note of failure, in its gallery of miserable characters, in the way it attempts to make the audience feel every heavy step its heroine takes, A Gentle Creature is not an easy sit. What’s more, the final passage is a major miscalculation, abandoning what works—albeit gruelingly—about the rest of the film. All the same, the sheer scope of the project demands recognition. It misses the moon by a galaxy, but at least it is has the nerve to take the shot.”
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw finds the film to be “gripping and absorbing in its way, although perhaps too conscious of its own metaphorical properties and opinion may divide as to whether its expressionist element works. Yet there is no doubt as to its power, and its severity.”
In the Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Felperin notes that it’s only “tenuously related to the Dostoyevsky story of the same name and the 1969 film adaptation of that source material by Robert Bresson” and “there are piercing echoes here of absurdist fiction by Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka and others, as well as mythical journeys to the underworld.”
“The film needs to be viewed as a fantasy, first and foremost,” argues Nikola Grozdanovic at the Playlist. As for that dream sequence, Barbara Scharres, writing for RogerEbert.com, sees it as “the film’s magic-realist relief and a touch of almost Kaurismäki-like humor. Like almost everything else in this film, the trip to a fairytale cottage in a horse-drawn carriage goes from dream to bureaucratic nonsense to true nightmare.” At Cineuropa, Fabien Lemercier considers it to be a “suicidal stylistic about turn (which will nonetheless perhaps acquire cult status in time, who knows).”
Screen’s Lee Marshall: “Working once more with Moldovan cinematographer Oleg Mutu (whose credits include 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, In Bloom, and Beyond the Hills), the director is on top cinematic form in A Gentle Creature, juxtaposing a few brief, melancholic golden-hour landscape shots with cramped interiors—buses, train compartments, waiting rooms, cars and nightclubs—that suggest Russian prisons are not just of the penal variety. A masterful multi-layered shot that occurs during the woman’s police car ordeal is just one of several small miracles of visual storytelling. Music is mostly diegetic, with Soviet-era military anthems and sentimental love songs belted out by several characters along the way, stoking a maudlin patriotism whose dark underbelly Loznitsa sets out to illuminate.”
VIDEO
“I’m passionate both about fiction and about documentary,” Loznitsa tells Variety’s Alissa Simon. “And yes—I work all the time. The next fiction project is called Donbass. It’s a contemporary story taking place in Ukraine. If everything goes according to the plan, we begin the preparations in September or October.”
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