{"id":15039,"date":"2022-06-29T20:00:55","date_gmt":"2022-06-30T00:00:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=15039"},"modified":"2022-06-28T17:46:48","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T21:46:48","slug":"a-gentle-creature-2017-sergei-loznitsa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/15039","title":{"rendered":"A Gentle Creature (2017, Sergei Loznitsa)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Woman in the countryside travels to confront the government about an irregularity, and the government laughs and destroys her.  Although it&#8217;s not entirely the people in power &#8211; her fellow members of the public are awful, and she&#8217;s insulted by everybody.  Tempting to watch it as a document and think &#8220;wow Russia is a terrible country,&#8221; but after a scene of beautiful cranes on rooftops, it felt more like sci-fi horror, as something that could befall any country.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/agentle2.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Her coworker at home: &#8220;My man never went to prison, so I never had a chance to see the world.&#8221;  Everyone certainly talks a lot, but Vasilina Makovtseva&#8217;s performance shines whenever there&#8217;s a short break from reading subtitles.  She ends up in a town outside the prison where her husband is possibly being held (she never finds out), a corrupt little mini-society feeding on visitors like herself, nobody ever giving straight answers, or help without strings attached.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/agentle3.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>She dreams of being taken by guards to a fancy reception where all the people who&#8217;ve given her shit along her journey take turns explaining their points of view and applauding each other, after which she&#8217;s raped in a prison van, then awakens and is led away by another surely untrustworthy guide.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/journal\/image21\/agentle1.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>Upon realizing this is a Dostoevsky story, I realized I could repeat my <a href=\"\/journal\/archives\/14806\"><em>White Nights<\/em> Fest<\/a> from last year.  Then I read the story (written 30 years after <em>White Nights<\/em>) and realized this is more of an &#8220;inspired by&#8221; situation, since the book follows an unhappy marriage ending in her suicide.  Seems like Loznitsa just liked the title &#8211; Makovtseva is surely a gentle creature, but more determined than she ever appears.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Woman in the countryside travels to confront the government about an irregularity, and the government laughs and destroys her. Although it&#8217;s not entirely the people in power &#8211; her fellow members of the public are awful, and she&#8217;s insulted by everybody. Tempting to watch it as a document and think &#8220;wow Russia is a terrible [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1049,3024,2109,247,45,2276],"class_list":["post-15039","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-2010s","tag-bureaucracy","tag-dostoevsky","tag-prison","tag-russia","tag-sergey-loznitsa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15039","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15039"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15039\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15080,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15039\/revisions\/15080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15039"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15039"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15039"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}