In this superb and rather restrained film, the soft, earthy and underexposed visual style juxtaposes the harsh sonic shrieks of a child playing violin, train whistles and screeching breaks, howling wolves in the wind, and a woman screaming for her life in an arctic wasteland. Similarly, the simplicity and passivity of the prisoners is contrasted with the mechanistic social and structural violence surrounding them.
There's a strange innocence to the way in which most of the main characters in this film use their fleeting moments of freedom to further imprison themselves in pain, obligation and debt. Of the five stoic, yet gentle prisoners given a week's parole to travel to their respective homes, all of them are transported into different contexts of confinement -- whether emotional, psychological or physical -- full of restrictions and seemingly foregone conclusions.
Restrictions on the freedom of movement, sexual urges, existential choice, gender roles and other forms of social behavior creates a kind of emotional numbness in the main characters' (and their wives')already drained dispositions. In light of their inability to negotiate their surroundings, it seems as though many of them willingly succumb to what they might perceive as a pre-determined fate.
Looking at just one of the five stories: after arriving home, one of the men is encouraged to kill his adulterous wife in order to save the family reputation while she's held in isolation as a prisoner in a remote mountain village. The roles have now been reversed and the situation grows in complexity to the point where the man's indecisiveness contributes to his wife's death in a vast, frozen landscape. In the film's greatest sequence, the man takes his wife and son back across the arctic emptiness where the carcass of his abandoned horse -- one of the many symbols of freedom and strength in the film-- lies picked apart by birds, wolves and the wind in the very place where his wife will die, providing the perfect image of a man, a woman, a child and a country exposed, ravaged and forsaken in an emotional wasteland.
There's a strange innocence to the way in which most of the main characters in this film use their fleeting moments of freedom to further imprison themselves in pain, obligation and debt. Of the five stoic, yet gentle prisoners given a week's parole to travel to their respective homes, all of them are transported into different contexts of confinement -- whether emotional, psychological or physical -- full of restrictions and seemingly foregone conclusions.
Restrictions on the freedom of movement, sexual urges, existential choice, gender roles and other forms of social behavior creates a kind of emotional numbness in the main characters' (and their wives')already drained dispositions. In light of their inability to negotiate their surroundings, it seems as though many of them willingly succumb to what they might perceive as a pre-determined fate.
Looking at just one of the five stories: after arriving home, one of the men is encouraged to kill his adulterous wife in order to save the family reputation while she's held in isolation as a prisoner in a remote mountain village. The roles have now been reversed and the situation grows in complexity to the point where the man's indecisiveness contributes to his wife's death in a vast, frozen landscape. In the film's greatest sequence, the man takes his wife and son back across the arctic emptiness where the carcass of his abandoned horse -- one of the many symbols of freedom and strength in the film-- lies picked apart by birds, wolves and the wind in the very place where his wife will die, providing the perfect image of a man, a woman, a child and a country exposed, ravaged and forsaken in an emotional wasteland.