Issue 88 (2025) |
Anton Kolomeets: The Light (Svet, 2023) reviewed by Mikhail Itkin © 2025 |
In a typical Russian town lives a seemingly ordinary middle-aged woman, Tatiana (Elena Iakovleva). She is calm, caring, and respected—an honest worker, a loving and loved mother and wife. She spends her days managing a local social services organization, visiting the elderly and helping with their needs, often neglecting her own. On the eve of Tatiana’s 60th birthday, her family and friends organize a celebration in her honor. After her husband performs a song from their youth, “I am looking in your eyes, speechless...” (Bezmolvno ia v tvoi glaza gliazhu...), Tatiana suddenly bursts into tears with no one and nothing able to console her.
This scene, placed at the end of the film, features the first (and last) overt expression of Tatiana’s grief, the trauma that she has carried inside for many years. It stems from the separation from her best friend, Marina, which occurred when they were teenagers. Like with any trauma, the memories of this event continuously resurface for Tatiana, merging with the present. Flickering flashbacks to the 1970s open a portal into Tania and Marina’s youth, filled with summer evenings, dances in the city park, trips to the countryside, swimming in the river, and listening to the guitar by the bonfire. This peaceful, Claude Monet-like setting, imbued with sunlight, trees, water, and the romantic aspirations of adolescents, is reminiscent of Sergei Soloviev’s One Hundred Days After Childhood (Sto dnei posle detstva, 1975), where nature also serves as the backdrop for a platonic teenage romance. While partially reconstructing this idyllic landscape, The Light goes further to give a tragic ending to this romantic play, when Marina chooses her new boyfriend over staying friends with Tania, causing an irreparable rupture between the two.
The Light is the second feature-length film by the young director Anton Kolomeets, who was previously a co-writer for the celebrated TV show Chicks (Chiki, 2020, dir. Eduard Oganesian) and the director of Your Tutor (Vash repetitor, 2018), a film about a romance between an adolescent and an adult. The Light proved to be more successful than Kolomeets’s debut, partly because it won several festival awards, including the Grand Prix at the Vyborg Film Festival (Window to Europe) in 2023, but mainly due to its apparent and graspable universality. In one of the interviews, Kolomeets echoes numerous spectators and critics by framing the film as a story “about friendship, past and present, parents and their children... a story that heals and produces a therapeutic effect” (Murygina 2024). Without directly explaining the traumatic event that structures the dual temporality of the film, the creators present The Light as a nostalgic drama. This longing for the past is hinted at by the film’s slogan, “There is no present without the past” (Bez proshlogo net nastoiashchego), and by its leading actress, Elena Iakovleva, who claims that “the return to the past is inevitable for any generation” (Shavlovskii 2024).
The film's universal appeal largely stems from the effect of recognizability, especially through the somewhat prototypical figure of a mother in her 60s, as portrayed by Iakovleva. Famous primarily for her roles in Petr Todorovskii’s Intergirl (Interdevochka, 1989) and as detective Kamenskaia in the eponymous long-running TV show (1999–2011), Iakovleva in The Light once again represents the exemplary person of her generation—someone whose experience of getting to know the big, wide world was shaped by the era of stagnation. Positioning her younger self in a pastoral universe devoid of any political signs, The Light eschews the memory of Iakovleva’s role in the film about a sex worker during the turbulent perestroika and directly bridges the idyllic adolescence of the Soviet 1970s with the apolitical reality of the Russian 2020s. Even though Tatiana is a head social worker in a likely state-funded organization, the film never exposes the state as such, neither visually nor verbally. Unlike in Anna’s Feelings (Chuvstva Anny, 2023, dir. Anna Melikian), where a similar character played by Anna Mikhalkova is constantly exposed to her Orwell-like surroundings, Tatiana in The Light quietly walks out the door—followed by the camera—when her son starts to argue with his father about the validity of Russian TV propaganda. Given Iakovleva’s own political stance and involvement with recent state-funded and ideology-friendly animated films like Cheburashka (2023, dir. Dmitrii Diachenko), The Light and its protagonist, at least on the surface, present conformity as a norm, raising interest in private matters while remaining intentionally ignorant of political ones.
However, despite offering a polished, “cozy,” and agreeable image, The Light still deviates from the mass-market TV productions typical of the Russia-1 channel or shows like Orlova and Aleksandrov (2015), which actively attempt to revive the Soviet context. Without degrading into theatricality, The Light, according to its director Kolomeets, deliberately avoids reproducing Soviet realities from a historical standpoint and instead focuses on personal experience and sensitivity by making use of poetic language. The film employs long takes, slow camera pace, deep space, accentuation of natural landscape, which overall comprise an homage to Tarkovskii, as if by following his tenet that “the image is not a certain meaning, expressed by the director, but an entire world reflected as a drop of water” (1989: 110).
The imagery of The Light is indeed structured as a chain of reflections: in tune with the doubling, crisscrossing imprints of nature on glass surfaces, the storyline about the past is constantly echoed in the present. Andrei Konchalovskii’s Romance for Lovers (Romans o vliublennykh, 1974) is playing on the TV when Tatiana and her husband speak to their son over the phone; in the scene from the past, Tania suggests to Marina that they go and see the film “for the hundredth time.” The young Tania makes small slips of the tongue (“lozhu” instead of “kladu,” or “odela” instead of "nadela"), which Marina corrects, and Tatiana in the present gets scolded for similar mistakes by the woman she is caring for. In one retrospective scene, Marina confides in Tania that she wants to name her future son Mitia; in the present, we learn that Tatiana chose this name for her own son and that it is also the name of a client whom she occasionally meets throughout the film. This doubling and mirroring intricately weaves the past and the present, showing an inarticulate but continuing bond between Tania and Marina—as if their play of pretending to be one another forever transformed them into mirror images of themselves.
The encounter with the reflection of oneself, as traditionally understood in Lacanian theory, presupposes an endless and hopeless search for an unattainable ideal and the resulting split in subjectivity. Torn between her lost reflection and her present identity, Tatiana remains in the dark until sudden flashes of memory, accidental encounters, and revelations bring her back to the past, destabilizing her present. Much like in the films of Pedro Almodóvar—whom Kolomeets names as one of his favorite directors—the constant search for something that could elucidate the protagonist’s self and fill the gaps in their story is synchronous in The Light with a concealed, unspoken desire. Through glances at each other, at other girls, touches, and promises to always be together, Tania and Marina represent an exemplary female friendship in the best traditions of Soviet storytelling—until the moment Marina abandons Tania.
The suffering from unrequited feelings, which Tania clumsily hints at by telling an anecdote about a love triangle, is revealed later in the film, in the present timeline, through the mise-en-abyme theater performance that Tatiana attends. An actress on stage emerges from the darkness and recites a monologue about lost love: “While I was with you, I was not afraid of uncertainty. The uncertainty without you is darkness. Tell me, where does this light go?” Even though these words are directed at a male image, the light/darkness metaphor in the film is almost exclusively tied to Tatiana’s past and her relationship with Marina, never to men. Men in The Light are little more than background characters; they are present in Tatiana’s life, but she is not passionate about them. Additionally, the absence of men as objects of desire leads one to reconsider the meaning of the love songs from the 1970s performed in the film. While the lyrics “Only you I have been waiting for, and only you I love,” sung by the girls at the beginning, could still imply a male figure, the song performed by Tatiana’s husband at the end is largely gender-neutral—and it is this song that finally makes Tatiana face her trauma and let out her feelings. It is precisely at this moment that, to invoke Lacan once again, Tatiana approaches her elusive objet petit a, the desired other, and confronts the real—leaving us wondering how transformative this encounter will be.
As Grace McNealy (2021, 439) articulates, “We can forge a connection between Lacan’s invisible yet desirable object and a queer existence and desire that has, out of necessity or perhaps even choice, remained invisible and imperceptible to the general public eye”. Seemingly apolitical on the surface, The Light hides within its depth a story about a love that once was—and now, once again, is—deemed inappropriate and nonexistent in official Russian culture. Meanwhile, the film does not display this love explicitly nor antagonize it. It operates on ambiguity and double meanings, framing its inherent subversiveness as potentiality under the guise of conformity. Like the “figa v karmane,” an unspoken gesture of defiance in Soviet culture, it portrays queer sensibility without naming it as such but making it visible nonetheless. The importance of being seen is echoed in the closing of the first scene, when the camera looks across the river and one of the girls notices: “Somebody is looking at us from over there.” The film's ending, mirroring the first scene from the opposite side of the river, positions us, the viewers, as those who bear this gaze and make reciprocal eye contact. Only by allowing space for such an encounter, by rendering someone visible, is it possible, after all, to recognize and accept one another.
Mikhail Itkin,
University of Pittsburgh
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Works Cited
McNealy, Grace. 2021. “Queering the Gaze: Visualizing Desire in Lacanian Film Theory.”
Whatever 4, pp. 433-466, doi 10.13131/2611-657X.whatever.v4i1.106.
Murygina, Daria. 2024. “Ot seriala ‘Chiki’ k ‘Svetu.’ Anton Kolomeets o svoem novom filꞌme.” Argumentyifakty-Novosibirsk, 13 February.
Shavlovskii, Konstantin. 2024. “‘Vozvrashchenie v proshloe neizbezhno dlia liubogo pokoleniia’ — Elena Iakovleva o filꞌme ‘Svet’.” Seans, 5 March.
Tarkovsky, Andrey. 1989. Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art, trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: University of Texas Press.
The Light, Russia, 2023
Color, 108 minutes
Director: Anton Kolomeets
Scriptwriter: Anton Kolomeets
Cinematography: Ekaterina Smolina
Music: Savva Rozanov
Editing: Aleksandra Putsiato
Cast: Elena Iakovleva, Daria Konyzheva, Milana Vladykina, Galina Alekhina, Elena Zhdanova, Valerii Pankov, Sergei Volkov, Sergei Shanin and others
Production Design: Maksim Maleev, Liudmila Dupliakina
Producers: Anna Shalashina, Maria Iakubova, Oleg Shashkov
Production: WISH Media, with support of the Ministry of Culture of the RF
Release (RF): 22 February 2024
Anton Kolomeets: The Light (Svet, 2023) reviewed by Mikhail Itkin © 2025 |