Elena

Elena is probably about 55. She is a buxom, handsome woman who lives with an older man, Vladimir. Vladimir is about twenty years older than her, depressed and ailing and very wealthy. The couple resides in an elegant spacious, condominium with walls of glass and dignified mostly empty rooms. Vladimir has been married to Elena for about two years, although the two have been a couple for a decade. Vladimir has a daughter from whom he is estranged -- the girl is strangely nihilistic, vacant, and remote. Elena has a middle-aged son, Sergei, the apple of her eye, although he seems to be feckless, unemployed, and probably alcoholic. Sergei lives in a ratty, squalid tenement in the shadow of three huge cooling towers looming over a nuclear reactor in a tract of deserted vacant land. He has two children -- they are Elena’s grandchildren -- a baby, and a ne’er-do-well son, Sasha. A bribe is required, it seems, to extricate Sasha from military service and procure his enrollment at the University. Elena pleads with Vladimir, begging him for the money to arrange for Sasha’s matriculation, but her husband is stingy -- he feels some kind of loyalty to his own daughter and is reluctant to provide the cash that Elena needs to help her grandson. Vladimir coerces Elena into sex and, in fact, compensates her by saying that he will provide the funds to Sasha. But, then, while swimming at the gym, he has a heart attack, almost dies, and decides that the bulk of his estate must be paid to his daughter. Returning home, weak and convalescent, Vladimir sends for a lawyer to draft his will, planning to bequeath the majority of his money to his daughter and limiting Elena’s participation in the estate to an annuity. Elena, who has worked all her life as a nurse, kills Vladimir with an overdose of medication, although she tells the medical examiner that the old man died while they were having sex. She, then, loots the dead man’s safe and takes the money to her son, thereby assuring that Sasha will not be conscripted and can attend the university. While the family is celebrating in Sergei’s miserable apartment, the lights go out. Sasha leaves the , and, with a gang of juvenile delinquents, gets into a brawl in the brush and wasteland at the foot of the cooling towers -- he’s almost killed, but the director, Andrey Zvyagintsev, isn’t interested in facile irony. (He’s too austgere and cerebral for effects of that kind.) The kid recovers and we learn that Sergei’s down-trodden wife is pregnant with Elena’s third grandson. The family moves into Vladimir’s apartment and we see the baby lying in the bed formerly occupied by the old man who Elena has murdered. The sun sets and the world seems cold and grey. Zvyaginsev surprised filmgoers with his premiere movie, “The Return”, a strange, haunting allegory about a father and his children and their trip to a remote island in an abandoned area of Russia. As a director, Zvyagintsev’s theme seems to be fathers and their children -- in “Elena”, Vladimir is despised by his daughter, although she also seems to love him in a perverse sort of way, and, although, he tries to secure a legacy for the young woman, he is thwarted by Elena. Elena clearly loves Vladimir, acts like a dutiful wife, and has lit a candle in a church before an icon for his recovery, but she is implacable and determined -- nothing will stand in the way of her feral impulse to assist her grandchild even though both her son and Sasha are completely unworthy of her devotion. There isn’t a lot to “Elena,” although the film is exquisitely shot and boasts a gorgeous score by Philip Glass (we also hear the growling voice of very late Bob Dylan on Vladimir’s car radio.) Like “The Return,” “Elena” feels like some kind of allegory, although the exact correlation between the characters, who seem largely symbolic, and the themes that they embody is unclear to me. In an extra on the DVD, Zvyagintsev comments on the film, but like Tarkovsky, his ideas seem dauntingly abstract and he is so solemn and Slavic and impenetrably moral that it is impossible to understand what he is saying. The film seems to function on the contrast between the plutocrat, Vladimir’s sterile wealth and the squalid, if lively, apartment where the unemployed Sergei sits around drinking and bullying his kids and pregnant wife -- Sergei’s kind of folks, Zvyaginsev suggests will inherit the earth, although they are something like the cockroaches that will survive the apocalypse that dooms humanity to extinction. The movie contains much symbolic imagery -- a white horse and rider killed at a railroad crossing, sinister crows cawing to one another in the icy dawn, the power outage, and those looming, menacing cooling towers at the nuclear power plant. It’s an intelligent, well-wrought film with carefully measured, if highly muted, performances, the very epitome of a European art film of the most rarefied kind -- long takes and intentionally uncommunicative images (and great tracts of silence) -- and, although reasonably engrossing, the movie doesn’t amount to much.