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Critics Consensus: No consensus yet.
Critic Consensus: No consensus yet.
All Critics (19) | Top Critics (10) | Fresh (17) | Rotten (2) | DVD (2)
The movie contains a mesmerizing visual appeal.
Although discomfiting to audiences desiring a steady narrative thread (and less accessible to those unfamiliar with Eastern European history and culture), it sustains interest throughout as a devastating critique of Russian society.
There are hints of Tarkovsky in the poetic exploration of place and memory and the film is a demanding, difficult work. But the sense of a Dantean journey and a vision of utter hell are powerfully conveyed.
For long stretches, it appears to be a road movie headed nowhere. Still, the detours it uncovers are fascinating.
[Has] a bleak, grotesque, near-perfect poetry in its soul.
The world of "My Joy" is grim, though the experience of watching it and piecing together its fragmented story strands is anything but.
..."My Joy"'s striking structure is directly inspired by a strange record of anecdotes that disturb the story of a young truck driver's route through the Russian countryside.
It's a journey that takes us through unexpected, often harrowing twist and turns, unafraid to leave us perplexed, confused, or even frustrated.
Disjointed, wild, but often powerful look at Russian proletariats.
a lively work of howling wickedness
If the desire is to unsettle and disorientate, the movie succeeds, but it does so at the expense of pretty much all else.
Terribly difficult to come to grips with, and impossible to shake.
In "My Joy," Georgy(Viktor Nemets), a truck driver, is minding his business on a normal haul when he picks up an old man(Vladimir Golovin) as a hitchhiker who regales him with tales of the troubles he had getting home at the end of the Great Patriotic War. When Georgy futilely attempts to get diesel at a gas station, the old man simply walks off. Later, Georgy gets stuck in a traffic jam caused by an accident where a prostitute(Olga Shuvalova) who claims she is 18 tries to drum up some business. Okay, so far, not so bad, with the movie serving as an allegorical rumination on all that has not changed from the old Soviet Union to the new Russia, starting with random identity checks because nobody is really sure who anybody is anymore. Along these same lines, at a scene where the characters are talking about a war, it took me a minute to realize which war. But while it is okay to play with reality a little, here it goes too far which causes the movie to lose the narrative completely, making it almost impossible to follow for a good deal of its second half, which is an accomplishment for me, and not even remotely in a good way.
Super Reviewer
A melange of scenes, drifting back and forth between post-WWII and the present day (often without warning), featuring crooked cops, child prostitutes and thieves. The stories all document corruption in Russia and Ukraine and argues that it's deep-seeded in the national character; unfortunately, most of them wind up as inconclusive misfires, and the fatalistic sameness of each episode quickly grows wearying and---yeah, I'll say it---a little boring. May require two viewings to figure out what's going on here.
The film possesses you, haunts you, and ensnares you.
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