MOTHER RUSSIA
NYFF 45 is the fest that just keeps giving. Folks clever enough to have snagged a ticket to the October 4 screening of
Alexandra by
Alexander Sokurov got to tango with greatness. Through a bare-bones plot Sokurov ponders such heavy duty issues as the conscience of Russia and cost of war. And “Alexandra” is also a love story with a heart as big as the steppes, between, improbably, the titular grandmother and her grandson.
Alexandra schleps on a crude transport train and tank, accompanied by soldiers, to a military outpost bordering Chechnya to visit her grandson Denis. Embodied by octogenarian opera diva
Galina Vishnevskaya, the fearless babushka hunkers down with Denis in his makeshift room and wanders the barracks – casually violating military protocol. She bonds with a Chechnyan woman in a market over the border – “Men can be enemies" says Alexandra, "but we can be like sisters right away.” That the sturdy young soldiers protect and semi-revere this persnickety old woman hobbling about the stifling dusty camp in anklets elevates her above an individual grandma to an iconic Mother Russia. (In a humorous scene the recruits produce a table set with flowers for her dinner, as if in a 3 star restaurant). During her visit, Alexandra also argues with the camp commander about the absurdity (in the Existentialist sense) of war and armies – “Shooting is the only thing [Denis] knows how to do”; while the commander counters with the flummoxing rejoinder, “Being a soldier is Denis’s income.”
Some in the audience didn’t reach for the Kleenex till the end, when Alexandra’s new Chechnyan women friends wave her off at the train. Me, I started losing it after Denis shows his grandma how to shoot a Kalashnikov rifle, lifts her out of the tank, and then carries her off in his arms, her face pressed into his neck, as if she were his bride. The love between these two is fraught with the usual family mishegoss, it’s revealed in a later tete a tete; and Alexandra nags him, in typical grandma fashion, to get married. The scene takes on a different dimension, though, when Denis lovingly brushes her long hair, then plaits it, while through the half open door, another soldier looks on if he were in church. Alexandra then falls into her grandson's arms, exclaiming, “You smell so good.” He: “All women are the same.”
What is the nature of this love? The film exudes a powerful physicality through the animal health of the soldier’s semi-naked bodies that you can all but touch and, yes, smell; and Vishnevskaya’s magnificent face holds the screen in mesmerizing fashion. In Sokurov’s earlier
Father and Son critics noted the eroticized nature of the pair’s bond (an interpretation Sokurov rejects). “Alexandra” exudes if not erotic overtones exactly, then a passionate, mystical connection that goes several leagues beyond the filial love of domestic realism. The greatness of Sokurov is to summons a species of emotion for which we barely have language. This coupled with the auteur’s trademark ochre palette, and half-heard folkloric music enhances the dreamscape effect for which he is celebrated. Go check out for yourself the knockout sequence of the Russian night rushing by from the train, the black sky streaked with silver. At the press screening I attended you could hear, during those moments, a collective intake of breath.
# posted by Erica Abeel @ 10/06/2007 11:51:00 AM
Comments (1)
"The greatness of Sokurov is to summons a species of emotion for which we barely have language."
Thank you, yes, that is exactly why he is great.
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posted by @ 10/14/2007 6:37 PM
