The Postman’s White Nights

Description

Though pushing 60, postman Lyokha (Aleksey Tryapitsyn) is among the younger members of his sparse Lake Kenozeno island community, located in the remote northwestern Russian region of Arkhangelsk. He uses a government-issued speedboat to pick up mail from the mainland and then deliver it to his mostly elderly, isolated rural customers. While they’ve lived full lives, in some respects he’s still waiting for his to start—without wife or children (a prior marriage didn’t work out), he’s a naturally social fellow leading a haplessly solitary existence. The blare of glitzy TV programming provides comical contrast to a simple domestic life that in many ways has scarcely changed over generations. Making perhaps his smallest, loosest film on his home turf late in a career that sprawled from major Soviet epics to Hollywood projects and beyond, Andrei Konchalovsky charts a few leisurely yet eventful days during this near-Arctic area’s high summer season. Gormless Lyokha bonds with young Timur (Timur Bondarenko), but can’t make headway with his mother Irina (Irina Ermolova), whose plans to get out of this backwater provide no room for romance with a bumpkin. A local matriarch passes on; a nearby military “spaceport” is visited; our hero’s nights are haunted by the mysterious appearances of an unfamiliar cat. A work crisis nearly drives him back to that “damned vodka” after two years’ sobriety. The Postman’s White Nights is one of those films in which “nothing happens,” yet every moment seems full of life—humorous, rueful, occasionally a bit surreal. Using mostly nonprofessional actors, Konchalovsky has crafted a poetical miniature as seemingly offhand in storytelling terms as it is frequently ravishing in visual ones. —Dennis Harvey

Trailer

Film Details