Lyubovnik (2002)

User Rating:

7.0/10   

Director:

Valeriy Todorovskiy

Writer:

Gennadi Ostrovsky (writer)

Genre:

Drama

Awards:

4 wins & 6 nominations

Cast

Oleg Yankovskiy	...	Mitya Charyshev
Sergey Garmash	...	Ivan
Andrei Smirnov	...	Petya
Vera Voronkova	...	Vera
Vladimir Yumatov	...	Stas
Valeri Prokhorov	...	Conductor
Yelena Laskavaya	...	Verbitskaya
Irina Sokolova	...	Sima
Irina Kartashova	...	Liza
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Pavel Adamchikov
Aleksandr Brankevich
Olga Gudovich
Galina Kashkovskaya	...	Galya - Ivan's daughter
Olga Klebanovich
Mikhail Kochanovsky
Natalya Kochetkova
Aleksei Kolokoltsev
Yevgeni Kozyrev	...	Painter
Varya Labush
Aleksandr Lukash
Viktoriya Maslova
Tamara Mironova
Olga Nefjodova
Ivan Novitsky
Zinaida Pasyutina
Tatyana Rozhavskaya
Yuliya Rytikova
Elena Shabad-Ozerova
Vladimir Voronkov
Zinaida Zubkova

Also Known As:

Любовник (Russia)
The Lover (International: English title)

Runtime:

Argentina:102 min (Mar del Plata Film Festival) | Canada:96 min (Toronto International Film Festival) | Spain:100 min (120 episodes)

Country:

Russia

Language:

Russian

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Dolby Digital

Certification:

Argentina:13

Company:

Racoon-Kino

A boring Russian movie about whining featuring an artistic pretense.

It's a boring movie about a middle-aged man Dmitry who, after burying his younger wife Elena, finds out she had a lover for 15 years-that's the age of both their marriage and their son. Worse: all of Elena's relatives and friends turn out to have known about her affair. The widower and the lover then meet and engage into the most aimless pursuit of figuring out how long? When? What? And whose is the son? Valeri Todorovsky, the movie's director, must have thought he was unearthing the deepest layers of the so-called big Russian soul. What he succeeded in was a grim movie about male impotence. That impotence is the main characters' inability to overcome their grief and re-enter the world around them. As a way of coming to terms with it, Dmitry--representative of `intelligentsia' and a linguist--starts using foul language in class-something totally unacceptable in the Russian culture. Visuals in the movie are good as individual photographs but not as Motion pictures. Photography, that could be used to counterbalance Dmitry's hopelessness, only worsens the overall grim mood. A crane shot at the cemetery looks like it belongs in a music video. As I was watching the movie in a ¾-filled theater, I kept hearing hysterical laughter and applause in reaction to certain scenes. The movie does have its grotesque moments and a good deal of sarcasm, but they are buried in endless banalities. The funny thing is, the only people who applauded when the credits rolled, appeared to have been somehow related to the film crew. Ferzan Ozpetek's `Le Fate Ignoranti' is a much more interesting take on the same subject.