Starting to notice a trend in the four movies I've received as part of the 'Spout Maven's' group. Each of the movies has involved a young boy, set adrift, abandoned, neglected by adult foibles and shortcomings beyond his power to either influence or comprehend. In "Clean" it was drugs and show business, in "The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things" it was a whole myriad of child neglect nightmare scenarios, in "Mother Mine" it was WWII and the foster parent program, and, now in "Roads to Koktebel" we have alcoholism and abject poverty. This movie is what you would call 'deliberately paced', which is an art film term for slow moving. This film was so slow in fact, that I was convinced at one point that it was moving backwards. We are introduced to a father and son travelling with little or no means of support from the big city of Moscow to a new life at a sister's house by the Black Sea. The father and son seem rather distant from each other, the father speaks in curt sarcastic tones to the boys' occasional questions, and the boy has a stern far off look of sad determination much of the time. We gradually understand by the father's refusal of vodka, that he had a drinking problem at some point, which may have added to their bad fortune, and that the boy's mother died at some point in the past and may have led to the drinking, but it is never spelled out in so many words. At one point he falls off the wagon with a persuasive host, and shows signs of alcoholic desperation for a single scene, but seems to get over it rather quickly (a shotgun to the shoulder will do that I suppose), and when they are taken in by a somewhat attractive woman doctor, the father falls under her charms and abruptly changes their plans and decides to stay there with the woman. The son gets fed up with the father and takes off to complete the journey alone. There are frequent allusions to flying and albatroses throughout, and when the boy reaches the 'sea' we are treated to a few confusing scenes that I suppose have something to do with the 'flying' metaphor, but they were lost on me, I'm afraid. The film is beautifully shot, the bleak Russian landscapes and life of poverty were filmed with a real love of composition and color. I was reminded of the Cormac McCarthy book "The Road" (except without the cannibals), in which the boy eventually leaves the father to find his own path - and I was also reminded of the wonderful film "Sullivan's Travels" about the filmmaker who wants desperately to make a 'serious film' about 'real people', 'real poverty and real desperate lives', and discovers that real people go to the movies to escape their 'real poverty and real desperate lives' (and to make this point the movie is wonderful in the way it uses every cheap escapism trick in the book, slapstick car chases, caricatured stereotypes, pratfalls, and Veronica Lake does a number of titilating shower scenes).