I watched The Return.   (I have Burnt by the Sun sitting here waiting for me to watch it.)

I'm not much of a film critic so I have nothing profound to say.  I liked it although I found it somewhat disturbing.  It was beautifully filmed and I found myself looking at the landscape when I should have been reading the subtitles.  The whole boreal forest region has always appealed to me here on this continent so I was interested to see it on another continent.

I kept trying to impose American movie values on the story and, therefore, I kept being surprised by the twists in the story.  I assumed until about halfway through that it was a typical coming of age movie and that nothing really bad would happen.  I also expected that there would be rapprochement and understanding between the father and the younger son (as there would have been in an American movie).  But it soon became clear that this was a harsher story than you would see in American cinema (although maybe not harsher than American fiction set in the west.)  I started to get disturbed when he left the kid on the bridge and it wasn't clear if he was coming back.  And I was particularly disturbed when the motor conked out on the way to the island in that dilapidated boat with a storm coming up.  Of course as they survived each of these I assumed that we were moving toward a happy ending (or at least a neutral ending).

Boy was I wrong. The end was a total surprise to me.  

So - what should I learn about Russia from this?