General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Banishment (Изгнание)

The Banishment (Изгнание) is a 2007 Russian psychological drama directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev, his second feature film, about a husband and wife whose marriage breaks apart after the wife reveals that the child she is expecting is not her husband's.¹ The film competed for the Palme d'Or at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and won the festival's award for best actor, given to Konstantin Lavronenko.²

Key fact	Detail
Director / year	Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2007; his second feature after The Return (2003)¹
Source	Based on a story by the American writer William Saroyan³
Cannes 2007	In Competition; nominated for the Palme d'Or; Prix d'interprétation masculine (best actor) to Konstantin Lavronenko²
Runtime / budget	150 minutes; budget $4,500,000²^•¹
Premieres	World premiere 18 May 2007 at Cannes; Russian release 4 October 2007¹
Box office	$641,101 worldwide, of which $330,900 in Russia¹
Reception	Kinopoisk rating 7.3; Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer 65% from 20 reviews; average of 74 from 13 Russian critical reviews¹^•⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Plot and setting

A man, his wife, and their two children, a young boy and a small girl, leave an industrial city for the countryside where the husband grew up, and settle in the old house of his father.² The Cannes synopsis describes the contrast between the two places: the city embellished the relations between the characters and created an illusion of happiness and love, while the new setting is nature, a sad but proud land that conceals everything and demands an immense sacrifice.²

The dramatic trigger comes after the family arrives. In the evening, once the children are asleep, the wife tells her husband that she is pregnant and that the child is not his.¹ The husband, Alex (Konstantin Lavronenko), interprets his wife Vera's turmoil as a confession of infidelity, unaware that jealousy is only the first of the trials ahead of him.⁶ The critic Andrei Plakhov of Kommersant noted that the action takes place "everywhere and nowhere", in a fictional country assembled from Belgium, France, and Moldova, where the shooting took place, though the landscape reminded him of Scandinavia; the characters speak Russian but lack national markers.⁶

The cast includes Lavronenko as Alex, the Swedish-Norwegian actress Maria Bonnevie as Vera, Alexander Baluev as Mark, Maxim Shibaev as the son Kir, and Ekaterina Kulkina as the daughter Eva.²^•⁵

Production

Zvyagintsev began work on the film immediately after returning from Venice in autumn 2004, where The Return had won two Golden Lions. He told RIA Novosti that almost three years went into the project from the first conception, with 103 shooting days in France, Belgium, Moldova, and Russia.⁷ The working title was "Запах камня" ("The Smell of Stone").⁸ Zvyagintsev said he wanted to create an atmosphere in which it would be hard to understand where and when the action takes place.⁸

The screenplay is credited to Oleg Negin, Artem Melkumyan, and Zvyagintsev, and is based on a story by William Saroyan.¹^•³ Plakhov observed that the original material was radically reworked, and that the literary quality of the dialogue was the film's weak point, with the drama sagging under the excessive running time.⁶ The producer was Dmitry Lesnevsky, the cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, and the composers Andrei Dergachev and the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.¹^•⁹ The budget was $4,500,000.¹

Reception at Cannes and release

The film premiered in Competition at the 60th Cannes Film Festival on 18 May 2007.¹^•¹⁰ It did not win the Palme d'Or, which went to Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, but Lavronenko received the Prix d'interprétation masculine, the festival's award for best male performance.² The trade press at Cannes called Zvyagintsev a master of mood and composition while describing the pacing and running time as an endurance test.¹¹^•¹²

After Cannes, distributors bought the film for 35 countries, not including the United States.¹³ The Russian release followed on 4 October 2007, four months after the world premiere, and the DVD was issued on 1 November 2007 by Soyuz-Video.⁶^•¹ Commercial results were modest: $330,900 in Russia and $641,101 worldwide against the $4.5 million budget.¹

Critical standing

Russian critics were divided. The aggregate of 13 Russian reviews on Kritikanstvo gives an average of 74, against 65 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from 20 reviews.⁵^•⁴ Anton Dolin, writing in Seans, called it probably the most asocial and abstract Russian film of the twenty-first century, whose action happens "everywhere and nowhere, always and never", and credited the self-taught director with creating a universal, international product that speaks to the audience in the language of visual images.¹⁴ Elena Stishova in Iskusstvo kino read the film through Old Testament codes and described Zvyagintsev's commitment to family drama not as a genre but as a cosmos of earthly existence bound by love and the absence of love.⁵ Detractors found the characters unnatural and the biblical allusions excessive; the Kinopoisk editorial note argues that by placing the heroes in an undefined place and time the director removes any possibility for viewers to identify with them.⁵^•¹

Recurring comparisons were to Andrei Tarkovsky, whose manner reviewers said Zvyagintsev reproduced with virtuosity, and to the film's painterly, contemplative style, with every frame worked out in detail.⁵ Later assessments placed the film within the director's early, deliberately abstract period: scholars note that, unlike Elena (2011), The Return and The Banishment cannot be confidently located in any specific time or place.¹⁵ In 2021 both early features were released in restored versions on the START streaming service, completing the director's feature filmography there.¹⁶

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Romantic drama films 2000s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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