Elena
could have been an old world Russian babushka.
She even still wears the traditional head scarves. Yet, she has married into the world of
oligarchic privilege. It is a pleasant
if loveless marriage, but fundamental disagreements with her wealthy husband
will take a dark turn in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena (trailer
here), which
begins a special two week engagement at New York’s Film Forum this Wednesday.
The
working class Elena met the sophisticated Vladimir while working as a nurse
during his convalescence two years ago. They
have little in common except their dismal records as parents. His grown daughter Katerina is an entitled
party girl emblematic of New Russia’s excesses.
Elena’s slobby unemployed son Sergey is only fit for queuing in lines
and getting drunk. That might have been
perfectly fine during the Soviet era, but it does not cut the mustard any
more. While Vladimir readily underwrites
Katerina’s high-flying lifestyle, he begrudges any support Elena offers her
deadbeat family.
If
anything, Elena’s thuggish grandson Sasha is even less accomplished than his father. In order to forestall his military service,
Sergey will have to bribe Sasha’s way into college, but Vladimir is not having
any of it. After collapsing in the gym,
issues of inheritance come to the fore, provoking Elena to action for the sake
of her proletariat family.
Such
“action” is a relative term in Zvyagintsev’s deliberately paced film. He is much more interested contrasting the
dramatic class distinctions of contemporary Russian than engaging in Double Indemnity style suspense. Frankly, viewers need to pay attention
throughout Elena, because it is easy
to miss the crossing of the Rubicon.
In
contrast, it is impossible to not notice the differences between the two
Russias. One is a world of glass and
steel luxury (perfectly underscored by sparing excerpts from Philip Glass’s 1995 Symphony No. 3), whereas the other is
a grubby suburb of Brutalistic socialist era architecture dominated by noxious
looking nuclear containment domes. There
is also a pronounced psychological difference as well. Vladimir harshly dismisses Sergey as a lazy
drunken slacker, but he is not exactly wrong.
Indeed, a mother’s love may oftentimes be blind (it might have been clever to have opened Elena yesterday, but it is hard to
imagine any son taking mom to see it) and Elena is arguably indulgent to a
fault. However, it is her relationship
with Vladimir that is most intriguing.
Nadezhda Markina palpably conveys a complicated lifetime of struggle as
the title protagonist, while developing some ambiguous yet very real chemistry
with actor-director Andrey Smirnov’s Vladimir.
The precise nature of their union remains hard to pigeonhole, with
several scenes supporting disparate interpretations.
