Katya (Yekaterina Radnikova) gives birth to Sanya (Misha Philipchuk and later Dima Chigarov) on a country road, boards a train, and quickly meets Toylan, a soldier who has served in the second world war. With a few moments of pretensions, she has sex with him, and as a matter of course they are a couple. Men are scarce, and Tolyan is rather manly and good looking. Not until after the first sequence of events do we find out that Tolyan is a thief, and quite quickly begins to have a bad effect on the little boy. Spitting on everything that is sacred, Russian, and good, Tolyan goes on his own life journey throughout the film, to come out at the other end a convict, who is killed by Sanya, never forgetting how Tolyan had wronged his mother.
To me, this is not a very interesting premise to work with. Simply enough. It is a tragedy of some depth though, and that is why I think it is important. And the fact of the huge allegorical shadow which is cast throughout, implying, of course that Joseph Stalin, the father of mother Russia, who was needed so badly, was a thief stealing the trust and loyalties of a nation and consequently a bastard as well.
The film is also, a double, if not triple tragedy, which for all practical purposes seems to make it that much harder to work with. Who is the story about, Tolyan or Sanya, as advertised on the cover? Well, it turns out that it is about both of them, and Katya too, which is still all to the good if it works. The somewhat prosaic and spare material has a hard time reaching far below the surface to reach true emotional depth, that is until after the movie is over. Vor is so much unlike in this respect of Chukraj's later work, the close to perfect 2004 emotional powerhouse Driver for Vera, which is a tragedy too but yet so much full of life.
In the simplest terms, perhaps, the allegorical antagonist is never hovering close enough to become real within the film for the audience. We know what Joseph Stalin did, and stood for, but I would say we need to see it happen again in front of our eyes. Kanchalovsky did this remarkably well in the 1991 film The Inner Circle, making the Stalinist horror play out in completion right in front of our eyes.
I am coming to think that a successful tragedy either has to be brilliant, like King Lear is, or Kirosawa's Ran was, hit all the right points, like Million dollar Baby, or/and has to be enough fleshed out to resonate deeply enough and long enough with the audience. This film is neither of the three, but works on some level simply due to it's sheer humanity. The main problem could be that the story is split in two, with our emotional sympathies not going to either character, or if to both for some viewers, then not in the right proportions. The simplistic revenge premise does not really do the subject justice. In Vor, we watch the tragedy unfold, but somehow fail to see it through the child's eyes. It is a heavy film, and at the end you will have come away with something.
I like the part when Tolyan says to Katya, at the crucial scene when she is planning to leave him near the train, "I like my life," I like the life I'm living." This kind of self-realization is what eventually gives Vor its legs. The voice-over bothered me aesthetically at first, but may have been necessary to tell the story in the way the film decides to tell it, that is to say, it would have been better done without.
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