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| Designer Sam Smith's favorite poster of the film/(courtesy MUBI) |
Andrei Zvyagintsev is one of the most interesting among active filmmakers today. He has only made three feature films. Each of those three films is built, to put it in literary terms, on the scale of a novella rather than an epic novel. Each film delves with aspects of family bonding—or at least that provides the least common factor for the tales, only to multiply and amplify on aspects of an individual’s life beyond the family, subjects often relating to psychology, politics, sociology and religion. And that is what makes any Zvyagintsev film interesting—its universality and its inward looking questions, all open ended for the viewer to ponder over after the movie gets over. And Elena is true to that spirit.
Famous Russian novels (later made into films) often had for
their titles mere names—Anna Karenina
or Dr Zhivago. But those novels went
beyond those ordinary names. (A few US films, such as Tony Gilroy’s Michael Clayton, also used ordinary
individual’s names at titles of movies.)
This is the case of Elena,
the movie. Elena is the lead character, an ordinary individual. Yet, she
represents much more than a simple individual. She represents a social
class, a generation, and the mother hen of a family. She combines diametrically
opposing elements of the angelic Florence Nightingale and a cool, calculated
villain. Like a Karen Crowder (played by Tilda Swinton) in Michael Clayton, you can spot Elenas in our society.
The basic story of Elena
is of a humble matronly nurse who marries a rich man, taking care of his needs
from hospital, where they first met during a hospitalization, to his elegant
home in the evening of his life. The obvious strand of the story is the social
disconnect between husband and wife, even though both are content and obviously
need each other. The woman needs the money and social standing of her husband,
and the man needs a woman for companionship and personal care and to manage his
upscale apartment. The rich man has a “hedonistic” daughter from a previous
marriage, who still loves her father in an aloof manner and lives her own life
far from the “family”. The father, in contrast, cares for the prodigal daughter
and is concerned about her future, while he is least concerned about his wife’s
progeny.
Elena has her own brood, from a previous marriage. A son, a
daughter-in-law, and a grandson with limited means and ability, who seem to
survive on Elena’s financial contributions, constitute the other branch of the
family tree. After the initial introductions of the state of Elena's extended family, the
story of Elena the movie takes off to a higher altitude as the drama progresses from
the preliminaries into intrigue culminating in an ending that will make an
intelligent viewer ponder over the various events in the film.
To assess the film as a mere tale of two social classes in
modern-day Russia would be missing the wood for the trees. It is indeed a tale
of the “invasion of the barbarians”—an original title Zvyagintsev had toyed
with using. The sharp contrast of the overhead shot of the rich old man in his
bed early in the film, with the overhead shot of Elena’s grandchild lying in
the center of an oversized bed is only one layer of the rich screenplay of Elena.
If a viewer thought the film was a tale on class
inequalities in Russia, it would be relevant to hear what the director has to
say on the film. To quote Zvyagintsev
from Elena’s press kit: “This is a drama
for today, told in a modern cinematographic language subjecting the viewer to
eternal questions about life and death. A monster disguised as a saint, a
repenting sinner facing her idols in a temple — how is that for an image of the
Apocalypse? The Devil is powerless when he stands before the face of God. Man
is powerless in the face of Death. And God is powerless in the face of Man’s
freedom of choice. Humanity holds the key to the future of this trinity.”
Now, this critic has always held the view that Russian directors like Tarkovsky, Andrei
Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, and Zvyagintsev are deeply religious individuals
(having grown up in the traditions of Russian Orthodox Church) and their cinema
betrays their theological bent even though traditional images of worship rarely
appear on the screen in their cinematic works. In Elena, there is a brief sequence of Elena praying but it is fleeting. At a critical point of the film,
the train on which Elena is travelling kills a horse on the railway tracks. A horse killed in an accident might appear
insignificant to many. Not so to a Russian filmmaker like Zvyaginstsev who
loves to use Tarkovsky-like images of horses one recalls in Solyaris and
Andrei Rublyev. For Zvyagintsev and for Tarkovsky, the white horse is a symbol
of purity and grace. And the killing of a horse in Elena suggests the fall from grace. The context has to be
understood by the viewer. So is the electrical
power failure or outage in Elena’s son’s apartment on Elena's second visit. In Zvyagintsev’s The Return, other Tarkovskian metaphors
like the sudden rains were brought into focus.
In Elena, the
opening shot is of an apartment viewed from outside, from the perspective of a
tree branch. There is a long silence until it is broken by a cry of a bird, a hooded
crow (Corvus cornix), if my knowledge
of ornithology holds good. The shot of the bird and its cry, are harbingers of
the varied metaphors strewn around the film. A crow is never considered a good omen. When the rich man takes out his
costly sedan to drive to go to his regular swimming pool, he has to stop his car for a stream of workers who
cross the road. Any Zvyagintsev film ought to be enjoyed like solving a
crossword puzzle. Every shot is loaded with a silent commentary. The obvious story line of the rich versus the poor is obvious for the
less interested viewer. However, Zvyagintsev has
presented through Elena his concern
for the diminishing ethical, moral and spiritual values in of the post-glasnost
Russia of today.
Zvyagintsev’s choice of subjects and the writer(s) to build
his three films gives an insight into the man. His first film The Return was
based on a little known Russian duo, who wrote TV scripts. Collaborating with
Zvyagintsev, opened up their careers to work later with the talented Nikita
Mikhalkov on the Oscar nominated film, 12,
loosely based on The Twelve Angry Men.
Zvyagintsev moved on to American writer William Saroyan for his next film The Banishment. He used the skills of
two other lesser known Russian screenplay writers, Artom Melkumian and Oleg
Negin. Between the two writers and Zvyagintsev, Saroyan’s work was transformed
into a slightly different tale with so much added punch. He cleverly dropped
the Saroyan title of The Laughing Matter
and called it by the loaded title The
Banishment. Zvyagintsev persisted with Negin on his third film Elena. What
Melkumian and Negin did to reshape the Saroyan tale, is accentuated by Negin in Elena, with a host of symbols and
metaphors that transport a simple tale of a family into the world of
contemporary politics, ethics, social changes and religion. The women characters in all the three Zvyagintsev films are interesting studies: they live to serve men. In Elena, the main female character drives the story-line, even though she lives to serve, first her husband and subsequently her son.
Zvyagintsev’s debut film The Return has all the trappings of the elements that made Andrei
Tarkovsky tick and the structured layers of meanings that the film offered were
mindboggling. That debut won him the Golden Lion at Venice film festival and 27
other awards worldwide. His second film The
Banishment won the Best Actor prize at Cannes film festival. His third work
Elena won him the Jury prize at
Cannes in the Un Certain Regard
section, the Grand Prize of the Ghent international film festival and the
Silver Peacock for the Best Actress at the Indian International Film Festival,
Goa.
These honors themselves indicate that Zvyagintsev is a
director who can pick good actors and derive great performances from them. In
the first two films, he stuck with actor Konstantin Lavronenko for the main
role. He was able to transform an actor with three low profile Russian films
into an internationally recognizable actor. For his second film, he chose the
talented Norwegian/Swedish actress Maria Bonnevie over Russian actresses and the lady delivered a smashing low-key performance. In Elena, a TV actress Nadezhda
Markina was catapulted into role that won her a Silver Peacock and the best
actress award at the Asian Pacific Screen awards.
Zvangintsev’s cinema cannot be appreciated sufficiently if
one does not notice his constant cinematographer Mikhail Krichman who went on
to win a Golden Ossella at the Venice Film Festival for his cinematography in
another remarkable recent Russian work Silent
Souls (2010). Krichman’s amazing ability to make nature and the natural
surroundings come alive in each frame is remarkable. The combination of
Zvyagintsev and Krichman is a gift for viewers, just as director Grigory Kozintsev
paired with Jonas Gritsius to give us those magnificent Shakespeare films from
Russia, Korol Lir (King Lear) and Gamlet (Hamlet).
Apart from actors and the cameraman of Zvyagintsev’s cinema,
viewers have been introduced to three remarkable musicians Andrei Dergatchev in
The Return, the Estonian composer
Arvo Pärt in The Banishment,
and now in Elena the minimalist US
composer Philip Glass. In Elena, Philip
Glass’ music comes in stark contrast to a diegetic soundtrack, when Elena heads
to the nest of her brood. Philip Glass has never been as breathtaking in cinema
as he has been in Elena and Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi.
And that is what makes Zvyaginstev’s cinema a rich total experience—great
thought-provoking screenplays, superb visuals, arresting performances,
delightful music and a direction that leaves you clamoring for more of such films.
P.S. Elena ranks as one of the 10 best films of 2011 for the author. Zvyagintsev's The Return and The Banishment have been reviewed earlier on this blog. The Russian films Silent Souls and Korol Lir (King Lear) and the US film Michael Clayton have also been reviewed on this blog.
