COMMENT >> FILM
A filmmaker's return
Andrey Zvyagintsev makes good on his debut's promise with Elena
A bleak look at Russia
In 2003, Andrey Zvyagintsev urban noir. At first, it's a place of emerged with the second-best dehermetically sealed routine, where but I saw during the '00s, The Remiddle-aged Elena (Nadezhda turn (the best? watch this space). Markina)—not your typical femme It was a cannonball-splash of cold fatale—gets up each day, draws water with a dramatic kick at the back the curtains, then awakes her end—a plunging twist on Russian older husband Vladimir (Andrey bleakness, tucking a political alleSmirnov). But Elena, an ex-nurse gory into a father-sons drama. who met Vladimir when he was a Then the director slipped under patient, will soon feel forced to the radar with his too-cryptic and chillingly alter that routine, ever over-long (for many critics) adso slightly, after he makes a aptation of a William SaroyT fateful decision. ASPEC an novel, The Banishment (2007). The melancholy, The space that pushm ekly.co vuewe @ n poetic (Joseph Brodsky's es Elena to do what a ri b Brian noted and W.H. Auden's she does is far away—a Gibson cramped little apartment in quoted), eight-minute Apocrypha, a film-within-a-film rua grey block of a Khrushchevmination on the digital-video era, era building on the city's scrubland proved a lovely bonus on the DVD/ outskirts. This dingy little world is Blu-ray of the anthology New York, I shockingly, starkly different from Love You (2009). the glassed-off city sanctum. Here, But Zvyagintsev truly returned her son Sergey (Alexey Rozin) and with Elena, from a screenplay by his family live; Elena asks Vladimir Oleg Negin. A frosty Moscow noir— for the money for Sergey to buy his again shot by eagle-eyed Mikhail slacking son's way into a university, Krichman—that picked up a Special thus avoiding the army. But, after Jury Prize at the 2011 Cannes Festisuffering a health-scare, Vladimir val, Elena was released on disc by draws a little closer to his estranged, Zeitgeist late last year, months after diffident daughter. (Near the end, its onscreen release in the UK and Zvyagintsev sucks us deeper into US to stellar reviews. these class-divides and generationThe film begins with a flicker of gaps when he follows Elena's grandfairy-tale—a web of bare branches; son out to some scrubland with his the cawing of crows—but the cool, friends—where his waywardness glass-bound, capitalism-era Mosbecomes feral.) cow apartment visible through the Krichman lends his coldly, carefully trees slowly becomes the site of drifting eye, curiously poetic in its
RATIO
eerie, gliding gaze. This expectant, tracking look, along with the story's steady snowball to Elena's act, leads us along an ominous way where whatever could go wrong, doesn't. A life's ended, but the days go callously on; pain is silently expressed or endured. That anti-moral makes this noir such a cutting, almost blackly humorous, Chekhov-like short story about the beaten paths and icy ruts of Russian life in the capital, postCommunism. (It's an everydayness unrelieved by the shooter videogames, tacky game shows, politicalpundit panels and magazine sellers glimpsed in the background.) In the disc's director-interview extra, Zvyagintsev reveals his extensive consideration of the story: its antifairy-tale sense of evil triumphing; a scene's indebtedness to Dostoyevsky; pushing past the original ending; the rhythmic movements between living (and dying) spaces; the implied criticism of a Russia where "patriarchal ideas [still] prevail." And he notes that the apartment was built; it seems appropriate that this glassed-off space was itself nesting-dolled within a studio. In a land of schemers, Zvyagintsev and Negin suggest, the urban cloisters of Moscow's elite are as self-sealing as the lowly masses' Communist-era flats are claustrophobic and stifling; but ultimately, in Elena, Russia's inward-looking, me-first capitalist future can't shut out its grasping, survivalist, Soviet past. V
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