ELENA
Dir: Andrei Zvyagintsev
In Russian with subtitles
**WINNER: Best Narrative Feature: Sarasota Film Festival**
It is always great to see a movie that takes place in 'modern' Russia. We rarely get to see how actual Russians live: this movie provides a glimpse into the world of both the wealthy (the lead couple live in a 'mod' apartment complex in Moscow) and the down-and-out (one family lives in a nondescript apartment block literally in the shadow of a nuclear plant).
That both of these worlds intersect is the crux of this brooding, artsy film. To steal the synopsis from IMDB: "Elena and Vladimir are an older couple, they come from different backgrounds. Vladimir is a wealthy and cold man, Elena comes from a modest milieu and is a docile wife. They have met late in life and each one has children from previous marriages. Elena's son is unemployed, unable to support his own family and he is constantly asking Elena for money. Vladimir's daughter is a careless young woman who has a distant relationship with her father."
Distant is putting it mildly: she's a cold-hearted be-yotch (that's the Russian spelling), even after she finds out her father has had a heart-attack and is in the hospital. But this movie is all about long-suffering Elena -- the second wife who acts more like a domestic servant. Her relationship with her no-good son and his family (living in the aforementioned squalor, while bleeding Elena of every dollar she can squeeze out of her spendthrift hubby) drives the plot.
The wordless opening scenes show Elena's morning routine (you'll be forgiven for mistaking her for the maid): she gets out of her single bed, heats water for the coffee, fixes breakfast, wakes her husband (they have separate bedrooms), opens his curtains. If all this sounds tedious, it is -- but that is the point!
To say that director Zvyagintsev shows great attention to detail may be stating the obvious: the entire film is composed of these details. [His first film, The Return, I did not see.] He is more interested in showing Elena putting away the groceries (another facet of Russian life we don't often see) than he is depicting the more dramatic moment when she finds out her husband suffered a heart attack at the gym (he cuts from the grocery scene just as the phone rings!).
This technique can be frustrating, but it has a purpose. The mundane makes the later revelations in the movie all the more shocking. (For one thing, we later learn that this couple has only been married two years, yet they act like an old, married couple).
To say the film's soundtrack is the best part of the movie is NOT damning it with faint praise: 1) you can say the same thing about many a Hitchcock classic; 2) dominated as it is by Phillip Glass' edgy Symphony No. 3, it provides a suspenseful counterpoint to the matter-of-fact action/non-action on the screen.
Elena's other family provides the grit and the violence we have come to expect from Russian cinema, but even those scenes are compelling. The visual style is pure Hitchcock as well -- just take a look at the movie poster: ELENA proves that birds are as potent a portent as any symbol that's glided across the silver screen.
