(Lithuania, 110 min.)
Dir. Audrius Juzenas, Writ. Panas Morkus
Starring: Anastasija Marcenkaite, Igor Savockin, Raiza
Riazanova
Sure to be an audience favourite at this year’s Bright
Nights: The Baltic-Nordic Film Festival is the ambitious and poignant Lithuanian
drama The Excursionist. This
intimately epic historical drama examines the aftermath of World War II through
the eyes of one courageous young girl, and The Excursionist is just as moving as it is revealing. (I
honestly knew nothing about this chapter of history before seeing the film.)
The remarkable and inspiring true story of the journey of young Maria
(Anastasija Marcenkaite) is bound to touch festival audiences this year.
Maria is just a young child when The Excursionist begins with a tragic scene in which she loses her mother on the cramped, chaotic train that leads a mass of Lithuanian’s to concentration camps in Siberia. Amidst death, fear, and isolation, Maria escapes the train (and “The Excursion” as it’s aptly called by the people she encounters on her long journey home). She faces a 6000-mile trek from her escape point on the Trans-Siberian train back to her family farm in Lithuania, but the arduous homecoming brings Maria into the care of some of the remaining decent people in this time of uncertainty.
The first people to help her are a farmhand named Vitiok,
played by Igor Savockin, who looks like a distant cousin of Willem Dafoe, and
the beleaguered yet nurturing Baba Nadia, played by Raiza Riazanova, who cares
for Maria after Vitiok nearly kills her after running over the doghouse that
she uses as a hiding place. Maria’s resourcefulness keeps her alive and her
ability to distinguish the kindness of strangeness from her own naïveté helps
her escape death more than once along the way. She even knows to assume the
pseudonym 'Masha' to protect her identity and pass as a young Russian girl.
Both these strangers risk their lives for Maria, especially
Vitiok who scurries her away to another train and teachers that new moral codes
apply in her quest for survival. Maria's trip home brings her into contact with
both the best and the worst characters of humankind in the aftermath of the
Holocaust and the rise of Stalinist Russia. For every sympathetic person
willing to assist Maria long the way, she encounters one or two brutally cruel
strangers who abuse and violate both her body and her spirit as if the recent
trauma of the war entitles them to punish those whom they see as weak. The
fallout of the war leaves the people of the Baltics in the larger mess of
poverty and hardship that plagues Europe, and The Excursionist matter-of-factly dramatizes the ways in which the
period after the war created a time of moral and legal grey areas with Maria finding
herself in between the forces of people struggling to rebuild and forgive
versus those who use the tragedies of the war to justify further heartbreak.
Director Audrius Juzenas handles the violence of
wartime very well, keeping it both realistic and brutal, but The Excursionist never pushes the
graphic nature of the violence too far for a story seen through the eyes of the
child. It introduces the violence of war gradually, bringing it into Maria’s
life first with the emotional toll of losing her mother and builds the horror
of the violence so that even an eleven-year-old can discern the senselessness
and callousness of the violence. The film evokes comparison to Cate Shortland’s
brave and beautiful Lore with its own
elegiac dramatization of a child’s struggle to make sense of the world around
her in the aftermath of war, although Maria offers the other side of the
perspective: whereas Lore knows only the war from the viewpoint of a German
child shielded from the dark reality of the Holocaust by her Nazi parents, Maria
emerges from the worst depths of the tragedy and discovers the light that still
flickers.
Maria, however, very much remains an innocent for all the
horror she sees. Played with resilience and remarkable compassion
by Marcenkaite, Maria is wise beyond her years simply for her cunning
intuition and her beautiful ability to see beyond the awfulness of the people
and circumstances she encounters. Maria, guided by faith and the memory of her
mother (whose presence is frequently implied and felt), sees only the hope and
kindness of her helping hands. The
Excursionist celebrates the hope and spirit that endures throughout history
even in its darkest and cruelest chapters as Maria survives against the odds
and makes an extraordinary trip back home. The radiant cinematography by Ramunas
Greicius has distinctly spiritual overtones as Maria’s faith guides her home,
but the warm use of sunlight evokes the human kindness that helps her along the
way. The Excursionist is genuinely
moving with its tale of an enduring spirit.
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
The Excursionist screens at the Bright Nights: Baltic Nordic Film
Festival on Sunday, Feb. 8 at 4:00 pm in the River Building Theatre at Carleton
University.
Please
visit www.cfi-icf.ca for more information
on films, tickets (including online orders!), passes, and memberships.
Bright Nights runs
Feb. 6-14. The full festival line-up may be found here.
