Road control

In the first minutes after the final credits of My Happiness I felt rejection and disappointment: it seemed to me that nothing new had been told, the story was not over. And again these gory stories: I had seen all of this a hundred times. Actually, what was that all about, what was the point?

But the sense of the movie began to dawn on me, as did the odd circumstances in which it was made. It is a peculiar live-action movie about Russia, shot in Ukraine by a former documentary director and jointly produced by Ukraine, Germany, and the Netherlands.

The leading story seems to be simple, rigid, like a police report. The hauler Georgiy (Viktor Nemets) sets out for an ordinary trip with a load of flour. On his way he runs into a traffic jam. He decides to find a bypass way through the villages, loses his way, and disappears in some rural area.

Director Serhii Loznytsia makes his character go through all the possible pits of the Russian provincial hell. He is attacked, robbed, offended, he is treated worse than a beast. Up to the very end of the movie Georgiy is not an action character, rather an observer; his passivity is a way to provoke, to verify the other people’s humanity. All the more so, Loznytsia introduces several scenes that have no direct relation to Georgiy, extrapolating one man’s story on the history of the community, i.e., the country or people.

The film is structured with mathematic clarity: as it usually happens on trips, My Happiness consists of lots of encounters, separate episodes, with each one being a description of specific characters, times, and customs. The remote place where Georgiy finds himself is shown by Loznytsia as almost a different civilization. It is under a spell, perhaps even cursed (there is a demonstrative dialogue with tramps who later cripple Georgiy: “Where does this direction go?” “To nowhere. It’s a dead end, evil spirits.”) New characters appear after every turn in the bewitched road: sometimes they are impenetrable like evil Asian idols, sometimes totally frenzied like an officer who sees a hanged man in a forest, or the mad old man in the final scenes reporting to the imaginary command, “I have destroyed the traces.” He repeats, over and over again, something about the “communal grave of traces.” The multi-layer story is pierced with prevailing motives: the film starts and ends in a road police post, with the “law-enforcement officials” seeming more dangerous than any bandits. The world we see follows the laws of the jungle, the war is waged by everyone against everyone.

On the whole, one easily robs and beats here, they start shouting and swearing in rage without second thought, the mere hint of love is burnt with red-hot iron, so “my happiness” refers to what the place is lacking, catastrophically so. Loznytsia creates a Chthonic world, which has neither monsters, nor demons: it has terrible habits and people’s relations.

However, in this darkness Grigoriy is just a witness or victim. He might be the only one who is innocent. Drawing religious parallels is fairly risky, yet I will dare foresee that the hero, by his function in the plot, is like an angel: he is a witness, his helplessness forces his surroundings to make the eternal choice between the good and evil. And when the story comes to an end, he, as a good angel should, punishes both the torturers and the victims. Thus, he brings the situation to an absolute zero. For he, who has been betrayed three times, deprived of memory and mind, thus innocent, has more reasons than anyone to do so.

Loznytsia’s hard cinematographic tale cuts in the mind like a sharp knife. My Happiness, without blaming anyone at the end of The Day, simply shows the level of mutilation of the world we are living in.

But while contemplating the film I understood: at some point of time the curse will be lifted.