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Average Customer Review
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14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
Calm, relaxing, beautiful, 28 May 2006
I found this film incredibly calming to watch. The pace is slow, perhaps even mournful, but this is so every inch of the beautiful Russian landscape is captured by the camera. The camera work is truly wonderful on this film, lingering on wide scale shots of the bleak Russian steppe in order to let that unique landscape and its splendour fully impact on the audience.
However, such slow pacing means that the story itself has substantially less impact than its backdrop. Substantial events are simply too far apart from each other for the story to have any real cohesive structure. The character based story is still quite strong, especially in the case of the father whose weaknesses and failings are revealed slowly as the story progresses. I found the character of the son rather flat, however, and based too heavily on childhood petulance. He acts as a tool of the film maker rather than as an independent character, for it is through the child that the weaknesses of the parent are revealed.
In conclusion, well worth watching. Despite some weaknesses in its story, the film is still highly memorable for the love and care that has clearly gone into crafting it.
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14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Russian Road Trip, 7 Mar 2006
"Koktebel" is a minimalist Russian film filmed in the style of Andrei Tarkovsky. It follows the road trip of a father and son across the Russian countryside from Moscow to the Crimean town of Koktebel. There are many exquisitely composed images in the film which turn the bleakness of the rural Russian landscape and the ugliness of much of it's architecture into things of beauty. In that sense the film is reminiscent of the stunning Turkish film "Uzak". There is superb cinematography throughout "Koktebel" , but despite the excellent acting and characterisation there is not much of a story to the film. We learn little about the background of the father and son, other than that they are trying to start a new life following the death of the boy's mother and that the father is an alcoholic. The pair meet a variety of colourful people on their journey to the Crimea and their relationship gets stretched to breaking point after the father finds a love interest en route. "Koktebel" is an atmospheric and thoughtful film and anyone who enjoys the films of Tarkovsky should like this too.
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3 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Interesting Film, 10 Jan 2007
I watched this at the cinema when it first came out, due mostly to the fact that it reminded me of The Return. The movie is very interesting, and much like The Return has a lot of meaning behind it. The boy's character and his relationship with his dad is also nicely attended to. If you liked The Return and other father-son type films, this is a nice gentle movie of that type.
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Good road movie - set in Russia and Ukraine, 10 Aug 2008
A pleasant enough road movie, about a divorced (or widowed, I don't remember) man going with his young son from Moscow to the Crimea. He's an aeronautical engineer who has been fired and has hit the bad times (maybe with the recovery of Russia's economy under Putin, the argument is slightly out of date). We see them traveling through the countryside in a dilapidated train, and then through the bad roads of Western Russia and Eastern Ukraine. Nothing much happens, but before reaching the Black Sea they stop at small towns, where they offer to repair the roof to a house where a mean old man lives, meet a pretty young doctor, etc. Some reviews I read wrote about the pair traveling through the desolate steppes of the former Soviet Union, yet this is some of the most fertile and densely populated part of that country. The pace of the film is slow, though not terribly so, compared with traditional Russian cinema, and the characters seem real even if the plot is slightly far-fetched. Recommended.
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Beautiful Film , 20 Mar 2008
This is a beautifully simple film. I bought it on the recommendation of the other reviews on this page and was not disappointed. It is a subtle story of a father and son setting off for Crimea to find a new life. The story picks up after the wife/mother's death, and charts their journey across the countryside which is stunningly rich and bleak in contrast. The relationship between the boy and his father gathers weight when the father becomes interested in a woman, and what makes the boy tick suddenly comes to the fore. No review can do it justice, it really takes your heart and soul somewhere else - it'll stay with you for a long time after.
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