The end of Ivan’s Childhood in Andrei Zvyagintsev’s The Return (2003)

Andrei Zvagintsev's The Return (2003) is one of the defining films to emerge from Russia in the first decade of the new millennium. There can be little doubt that it is heavily influenced by the work of Andrei Tarkovsky, yet it manages to become something much more than an imitation. Like Tarkovsky's finest work, the film is imbued with an articulate sense of nostalgia and is constructed as a richly multivalent text. Its palimpsestic nature, distinctly personal to each and every viewer, makes attempts to decode its symbolism interesting yet ultimately redundant. What remains is a deeply threnodic exploration of the problems of gender identity in contemporary Russia.