Alexandra

We all need a Russian Grandmother

2007

Review: April 25, 2008

Director: Aleksandr Sokurov

Starring: Galina Vishnevskaya, Vasily Shevtsov, Raisa Gichaeva

Hmm, maybe, but for the most part, not needed.

THE SETUP:

Russian Grandmother goes to visit her grandson, who is busy occupying Chechnya.

DISCUSSION:

My friend wanted to see this movie, which I had heard nothing about, so sure, I agreed to tag along. We had both seen the director’s previous film, Russian Ark, which he LOVED, but which depends on a fairly comprehensive knowledge of Russian history, which I am fairly out of the loop on.

So we open with this Russian Grandmother named Alexandra waiting for an armored train in the middle of the night, surrounded by soldiers. They slowly load her in as she gripes about this, moans about that, and she settles down for her trip. Alexandra is played by Galina Vishnevskaya, who in real life was the wife of Rostropovich and a famed opera diva. In this film she has an odd mixture of being totally gruff and verbally dismissive, yet is at the same time utterly magnetic and charming. She’s an old Russian grandmother and goddamn it, everyone is going to defer to her.

She arrives in Chechnya and is loaded onto a tank. Here is where you start to notice what struck me as the key feature of this film, which is the way the officers and soldiers all gaze in fascination at her. It continues throughout the movie. We’ll come back to that.

One is also beginning to notice the emphasis on visual textures. As Alexanra rides in the tank, you see the expanse of clouds behind her, in the desaturated colors that the entire movie uses effectively. The next morning when she wakes, her grandson Denis is there, and she spends a long while silently examining his skin, then the surfaces and parts of his gun. He wakes, shows her around camp, then has to go back to work.

One night Alexandra is restless, and she wanders around, ending up talking to these two guards at the gate. They ask her if she has any food, and she pulls some meat pies out of her bag. She falls asleep there and spends the night. In the morning, the commander makes to chastise her for wandering about, but she is not about to be told where she can and cannot go by anyone. During the day she leaves camp to walk into town. The guards at the gate [different ones] ask for cookies and cigarettes, but say they have no money. Alexandra walks the long road to town, and makes it to the marketplace where Chechens sell to their occupiers. One boy glares at her and refuses to speak, but a woman her age invites her to sit down and rest. The woman looks at the soldiers and says to Alexandra “The soldiers look like kids.” She invites Alexandra back to her home—a bombed apartment building missing its entire front façade—and they have a very sweet afternoon together. A boy commissioned to walk Alexandra back to camp says “I know it’s not up to you, but give us our freedom.”

She has another moment with Denis that evening, where they talk and he braids her hair, slowly and affectionately. In the morning he tells her he’s off on assignment and that she should leave. She does—the end.

The movie is obviously very small, with virtually no plot and no big scenes, but it’s all about the scene it is setting and the circumstances of what is happening, rather than the action. You have an overwhelming sense of the bleakness of this place and the endless pointlessness of this occupation, grinding everyone slowly down. This comes across in the listless nature of the narrative and its characters, and also through the washed-out photography and emphasis on textures—all there is to do is hang out and look at things. The film is filled with shots of the soldiers looking at Alexandra with a kind of curious but timid expectation, which adds up to an overwhelming sense that, because of the monotonous bleakness of their situation, they all yearn for the tenderness and protection of a grandmother. It sounds small, but this is really the primary content of the movie, and it is very emotionally effective.

The movie has a trace of the same kind of emotional tenderness of Volver, but obviously is much more dry and unsentimental. You don’t have to understand all of the politics to grasp its meaning, and it never stages anything obvious to smack you in the face. If you want to see a beautifully-done, movingly tender movie about soldier’s souls being ground down by war, here ya go.

SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?

Yes, it’s a very accomplished little film, and you could use a change.