In his skillfully helmed first feature, Isaac (Izaokas), Lithuanian writer-director Jurgis Matulevicius delves into his country’s turbulent past under both Communism and Nazism, following a trio of friends in the 1960s whose lives are overshadowed by a massacre that took place during WWII.
Mixing historical fact with an existential crime story, the film is bathed in a stiflingly bleak Cold War ambiance and marked by a strong display of cinematic prowess, including stark black-and-white compositions that suddenly break into color, and a constantly roving camera that tracks the characters through a maze of deception, trauma and troubled memories. Although it doesn’t quite pack the emotional punch to match its weighty subject matter, this is a debut worth investigating.
Winner of several awards in its homeland and representing Lithuania in the international Oscar category, Isaac, which was completed back in 2019, has been touring festivals for the past two years but is yet to find a theatrical life abroad. Further fest play awaits, while a few daring distributors may want to take notice.
The film opens with a harrowing recreation of the Liet?kis garage massacre, which was part of a widespread pogrom that took place in Kaunas, the second largest city in Lithuania, when Hitler’s army first occupied the country in June of 1941. As a group of townspeople stood by watching, dozens of Jews were viciously tortured and slaughtered by Nazi sympathizers, with a German soldier photographing the event. In the course of three days, up to 5,000 Jews would be killed in Kaunas and the surrounding region.
Matulevicius and cameraman Narvydas Naujalis capture the massacre in one uninterrupted take as we follow a man — who we later discover to be the lead character, Andrius (Aleksas Kazanavicius) — driven to participate in the pogrom by local fascists, committing a killing that will haunt him throughout the movie.
The rest of Isaac, which was written by Matulevicius, Saule Bliuvaite and Nerijus Milerius takes place over two decades later in 1964, when Lithuania was under Soviet control. By that time, Andrius has become a crime scene photographer, making a living taking gruesome pictures used in forensics investigations, as if he cannot escape his own memories of murder.
Andrius is a dreary man and clearly an alcoholic, his relationship with longtime girlfriend Elena (Severija Janušauskaite) more a matter of habitude than love. Their cheerless lives are soon upended by the arrival of their old friend Gediminas (Dainius Gavenonis), a successful film director who emigrated to the U.S. after the war and has returned to Lithuania to shoot a movie about… the Liet?kis garage massacre.
Thus begins a film within a film where the murderous legacy of the pogrom is carried across several formats: the movie, also entitled Isaac, that Gediminas is making — and on which he hires Elena to be his assistant, sparking up a potential love affair; the KGB’s surveillance of Gediminas’ project, through which they’re hoping to find the original culprits behind the Liet?kis massacre; and the dead bodies popping up under Andrius’ watch as he deals with the torment and guilt over his actions during the war.
The crisscrossing plotlines can grow a bit convoluted and are not always easy to follow — to the point that the film never builds up the suspense level it needs. But as a formal exercise it’s often fascinating to watch: Matulevicius, who has worked as a cameraman himself, stages each sequence in memorable fashion, with an attention to mise-en-scène that recalls the austere stylistic legacy of directors like Miklós Jancsó or Bela Tarr.
Along with the superb photography, production design by Paulius Anicus does a convincing job recreating the oppressive atmosphere of Soviet-era Lithuania, where the paint is always peeling off the walls and everyone is trying to keep warm. The style is reminiscent of recent ex-Eastern Bloc films like Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War and Kiril Serebrennikov’s Leto (all three movies were shot in high-contrast black-and-white), and although Isaac feels less assured in its storytelling, it operates in a similar vein, resurrecting the demons of totalitarianism in a well-crafted time capsule filled with fear and regret.
Director: Jurgis Matulevicius
Screenplay: Saule Bliuvaite, Jurgis Matulevicius, Nerijus Milerius
Cast: Aleksas Kazanavicius, Dainius Gavenonis, Severija Janušauskaite, Martynas Nedzinskas
Producer: Stasys Baltakis
Cinematography: Narvydas Naujalis
Production design: Paulius Anicas
Costume design: Agne Matuleviciute
Editors: Jurgis Matulevicius, Saule Bliuvaite, Gintare Sokelyte
Music: Agne Matuleviciute, Domas Strupinskas
Sound: Wojciech Mielimaka, Vytautas Kizala, Ignas Valotka
Production company: Film Jam (Lithuania)
World sales: Antidote Sales
In Lithuanian, Russian, German
104 minutes
