It's a great film. Loznitsa certainly knows how to use the widescreen frame, and that pre-credits sequence does more with it than most other films manage in two hours or more.
Gyorgy is the protagonist throughout, as noted, and his progress through this modern picaresque is not the traditional one of developing an identity
but of annihilating it, as at the conclusion he has lost everything, even more than the hitchhiker at the beginning of the film whose story he to some extent re-enacts.
One of the things I love about the film and that's most striking about it is how the film itself keeps trying to shake off its own protagonist. First there's the extended flashback to the hitchhiker's tale; then when we leave the traffic jam the film lingers for a moment with those two prostitutes; then there's that marvellous scene at the market where the camera scours the crowd for an alternative protagonist, but finally settles on Gyorgy again just as he's pushed violently aside, so they follow the guy who pushed him off into the woods, then change trajectory to follow an old woman, but ultimately end up with Gyorgy again. The unmotivated flashback in the centre of the film is another attempted escape from Gyorgy's gravity, as are those different sequences that follow the people who have crossed, or about to cross his path.
But even in his later, compromised state, practically devoid of agency, the film can't drag itself away from him, like a moral car crash it's cruising past.
After seeing this film, I was reminded that the former Soviet Union does seem to be the last bastion of big, ambitious, tough-minded art film made with formidable classical technique:
Melody for a Street Organ,
Paper Soldier,
Morphia. The kind of films it's often assumed nobody makes any more.
