My Joy (Moe Shchastie)

A man drags a body through snow. Then we see lines of grey concentric spirals of cement like mud being churned and folding towards a centre as fresh mud is poured into the edges of a pit into which the body has been dumped. We hear the dull mechanical sound of a tractor shoveling and moving more earth over the original liquid mass in the pit whilst in the background, we see a tall lanky man walking from screen left to screen right, head down, against the silhouette of what looks like a factory shed below a grey sky. Those are the opening shots of the Ukrainian film "My Joy" (Moe Shchastie) ( 2010) by the first feature film of former documentary producer Sergei Loznitsa, who wrote and directed the same.

Then we are shown a man behind the steering wheel of a truck Georgy ( Viktor Nemets). We  see what he saw. He is driving along a wide road lined with partly snow covered tall trees on both sides. He reaches a check point. We see a youngish policeman at the side of the road flagging him down with a black and white baton the white part of which flashed from time to time with probably battery powered light bulb inside. The truck stops. The young cop approaches the window. "Documents?", he snorts with a tired look on his face. The driver hands over his papers. The policeman asks, "what's in it". The driver replies, "it's all writen in the papers". The policeman looks at it for a few seconds, then throws a side gaze backward to another colleague about 4 or 5 truck length further down checking out another young woman bending down to retrieve something or other at the boot of her red sports car, showing more and more of the upper parts of her slim thighs below her short skirt as does so whilst his colleague oggles at her buttoms and the two exchange a knowing smile. The policeman gives the driver a dissatisfied look and says that he must get down and follow him. The driver does. In front of him, he sees the woman also walking in the direction of the control point building, a container like metal box in front of which are some metal steps with a primitive railing. 

We next see the woman being taken into another room. The driver is told to wait outside. He waits. We hear noises inside the other room, cries from the woman. After two or three minutes, the man takes back his papers placed on top of a shelf right at the entrance of the checkpoint control box, walks quietly down the steps. He quickens his pace towards another truck which has in the meantime arrived after he got into the control point building. Behind the steering wheel is an old man. He tells the young driver that the officers will probably be there for quite a while yet and asks him to come up. The driver hesitates, then gets up. Whilst inside, the old driver simply drives on without waiting for his papers to be checked. Whilst driving, he tells the young man his own story of crossing check point. He says that he was a young lieutenant in the Russian army and fought the Germans during the second world war. He was returning home to Ukraine to marry the most beautiful girl from the next village. He was crossing a border train station. Like all the other passengers, he was sitting on a bench waiting his turn for his papers to be checked. He was singled out and asked to follow the uniformed commanding officer there. He asked why and whether anything was wrong. He was told nothing was wrong but that since he is an army officer, he would get special treatment. He was pleased. He followed the commander into his room. They chatted and he was treated to some wine and sausages. During the chit chat, he was asked what was there in his suitcase carried into the room for him by the commanding officer's subordinates. He said he did not have much, unlike his own superior who had practically a truck load of stuff: just a beautiful red dress for his fiancee so that he can spot her from a mile away as she is walking down the village and also a Leica camera because he likes photography. The commanding officer says the Germans really do knew how to make camera as he played around with it admiringly. Then when it was time to go, the commander officer said that his luggage would have to stay. He asked why. The commanding officer didn't answer directly. He simply asked the  young lietenant whether he wanted his papers or his luggage more. The luggage stayed. He boarded the train. Whilst the training was moving out of the station, he took out his pistol and shot the commanding officer on the platform doing his other "duties". 

As the film moves on, we see the young man crossing other check points and how the old driver died because of other official brutalities, how the young driver took over his truck driving down the countryside, how the gas station would put up signs that they got no gas, no diesel to sell, how people who apparently are kind have all got ulterior motives to rob each other when the moment is opportune and how the young girls of 18 would sell their bodies to passing truck drivers and how payng such young whore by paying her without asking for her sexual services would be regarded as humiliating her, how the young driver himself got killed by some peasants who initially offered to shared some potatoes with him over a bon fire and how disappointed they were when they found out that all that the young man's truck carried was bags of flour, and how an officer who was carrying a coffin with another dead soldier's body inside around in the hope of finding his native village to bury him was rendered crazy because of the hoplessness of the plan as nobody seemed to have any complete records any more and how the words of those who are for the time in charge would become law, how for survival disbanded army officers who had been starving for days will reward a peasant living alone with his son will be killed and his house plundered by such officers after he fed them, and how in the end the driver of the army van with the coffin will trade his gun and his crazy superior's army coat for the signature of the another peasant so that he could bury the body, how married village peasant women would trade their bodies for money.

The film ends when a mad man living close by whose family had been robbed by the army officer hitched a ride by a good heared driver who told him that nowadays the best policy is not to meddle in other people's life got sucked into another case at that same border check point. On this occasion, a Russian police major was travelling with his girl friend and was being detained simply because his car's headlight was not working. He tried to show some money but was ignored. They were after his pretty girl friend. The driver who was talking glibly about not meddling was asked to put his signature to something obviously false. viz. that the detained police major was attacking them and was resisting arrest and thus handcuffed and shot.  He hesitated. He was offered a choice: his signature or his papers being confiscated. He refused to sign. Then he was shot, The film ended when unknownst to the officers, the mad man had come up to the entrance of the control tower building, he shot all of them and then walked down on the snow covered road from light into darkness.  Is the director suggesting that the ubiquitous abuse of petty bureaucratic power can end only by having all its officials wiped off in a bloodpath by a deranged man or that only a deranged killer will have the courage to do so?

The director seems to be saying that the whole of Ukraine is now bogged down in bureaucracy and the corresponding abuse of power and nobody can be trusted. The whole nation has been turned into a nation of thieves, robbers and survivors. 

There is some great camera work with spectacular scenes of the snow-clad beauty of parts of Ukrainian countryside and close up of the faces of the various characters we meet casually in the film but the story line is weak and wandering. The episodes do not tie in well together. There seems little structure. Only one theme threads the episode together: that honour, honesty, duty and kindness are words of a different era in Ukraine. It is a pot pouri of the director's snapshots of otherwise little known unpleasant realities of present day Ukrainian society linked structurally by the border traffic checkpoint. Film mirrors the moral bureaucratic confusion and corruption one finds in beautiful post-Soviet Ukraine but is in turn affected by such confusion! I'd give it a 2B minus.