My Joy (СЧАСТЬЕ МОЕ). 2010. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa

My Joy (СЧАСТЬЕ МОЕ). 2010. Germany/Ukraine/Netherlands. Written and directed by Sergei Loznitsa. With Viktor Nemets, Vlad Ivanov, Olga Shuvalova. DCP courtesy Kino Lorber. In Russian; English subtitles. 128 min. The first Ukrainian film ever to compete in the main competition at Cannes, My Joy opens, cryptically, with a corpse, a shakedown, a child prostitute, and a ballad from the Soviet-Afghan War. Ostensibly a circular road movie involving the strange and haunting tribulations of a taciturn truck driver, Sergei Loznitsa’s debut fiction feature treats Russian history like a festering trauma—the Hobbesian fable, though not without gallows humor, of a nation afflicted with the sins of war, occupation, and corruption. Loznitsa crowds his images with layers of activity and meaning, through grimy windshields and across bleak unloved landscapes, leaving the audience to puzzle through the film’s elliptical chronology, its many compulsive acts of brutality and occasional acts of thankless charity, the scowling faces of strangers full of menace or guile, and the identities of characters who are used, abused, and summarily dispensed with, only to resurface in mysterious and enigmatic ways.