Yuri’s Day-Yuryev Den (2008)

Directed by: Kirill Serebrennikov | 137 minutes | drama | Actors: Kseniya Rappoport, Roman Shmakov, Yevgeniya Kuznetsova, Sergey Sosnovskiy, Sergei Medvedev, Igor Khripunov

The famous Moscow opera singer Lyuba takes her twenty-year-old son on a nostalgic trip to the village where she was once born. This village, which lies in no man’s land in Russia, seems to have stood still for about twenty years during the great developments of the immense country. Lyuba’s son Andrei doesn’t like his mother’s ideas for making this curious journey into a forgotten memory. Once arrived, Andrei mysteriously disappears, after which Lyuba goes looking for him. Life in this remote village and the encounters with its inhabitants initiate a spiritual transformation.

‘Yuri’s Day’ is such a typical film from the Russian film stable. A very slow moving story, the attention for facial expressions and images and the mainly poetic and philosophical approach to life and society. It is not without reason that quotes from the writers Chekhov and Solzhenitsyn are given in the first minutes of the film. The story of the son’s disappearance is completely secondary to the development of the main character Lyuba and the changes she goes through. A journey through time, a journey of the human mind and the input one’s soul gets when they meet completely different people than themselves; the poor villagers, the addicted and aggressive man, the inmates who live in a kind of pigsty. This is what the movie is, not a story that has a neat beginning and end.

This is also one of the main reasons why ‘Yuri’s Day’ is not suitable for the general public. It is a typical Russian arthouse production that revels in melancholy and feels like an elongated philosophical poem. Although there is certainly an interesting premise, the film does not achieve the real power that actually leads the viewer into this spiritual narrative. This is mainly due to the too slow progress of the film. The opera and ecclesiastical music is of enormous value for ‘Yuri’s Day’, it gives you goosebumps from time to time, especially in combination with the excellent acting of lead actress Kseniya Rappoport.

‘Yuri’s Day’ by director Kirill Serebrennikov is a nice film about the personal changes of an individual after a major event. Unfortunately, the slow pace of the film combined with the long running time makes it difficult to maintain focus throughout the entire film. Kudos to Kseniya Rappoport, on the other hand, are certainly in order.