Overall

Good style cinema, something I’d rewatch, the movie almost gives you instructions on how to watch it.

These days my challenge with good cinema is to not get captured by the world of it but try to have parallel attention to technical aspects of the work. I feel If I can keep attention to technical, there is a general value to be realised.

Identity

The general point is that the protagonist has plenty of shallow, caricatured aspects of identity. And maybe there are deeper and higher aspects that can be seen.

The ambiguity of the pilgrimage is that it doesn’t sound practical on the surface. But it unquestionably reveals clear identity and there is power and aesthetic order in having it unambiguous. And it is not about the yellow tag per se.

Russian Identity

Given that identity is revealed in actual decision points and is more complex than skull and genetic features. And given constrained relations between Russia and the developed world, I bet there is Russian identity of a kind that asks to be defined.

Institutions of propaganda don’t produce identity, they just signal formal norms. I think identity is response to constraint and not the constraint itself and it’s de facto produced by individual’s actions that don’t serve external signalling. They must serve certain unconditional spiritual freedom.