'Alexandra' the Great
Sokurov’s latest is a different kind of war film
By Andy Klein
There are very few filmmakers with the technique, style, and sheer will to create strange, instantly accessible worlds that not only draw the viewer in, but also remain in the mind as places worthy of revisiting. In America, David Lynch is the most obvious living example; for me, Guy Maddin, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Alfonso Cuaron, and Guillermo del Toro are among the others with that power ... as is Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov, whose latest feature, Alexandra, opens this week at the Nuart.
It’s ironic that Sokurov’s best known film in the West (by far) is not very characteristic of his other recent work. Russian Ark (released here in 2003) achieved some notoriety for its technical daring: It was allegedly shot in one long, continuous take. (I have no reason to doubt Sokurov, but I must add that cautionary adverb because I’ve been burned on similar claims in the past.) Gliding around the Hermitage, St. Petersburg’s famous museum, Sokurov’s camera recorded an intricately choreographed spectacle – part art lecture, part historical pageant, part debate about the Russian soul.
Alexandra is nothing like that, having much more in common with Mother and Son (1997) and Father and Son (2004), Sokurov’s other two features to have received brief theatrical releases in the U.S. The technical challenges of Russian Ark handicapped his greatest asset – a talent for composing breathtaking visuals that evoke and rival oil paintings by masters. Andrew Sarris called Mother and Son “the most deliberately painterly film I’ve ever seen,” which pretty much nails it.
It may be too deliberately painterly. Mother and Son is also like “gazing at an oil painting, waiting for it to move” (as my colleague John Powers once wrote about a film from Andrei Tarkovsky, Sokurov’s early champion).
Father and Son – an outright masterpiece – was not only visually in the same league, but aurally as well, with the most effective expressionistic sound mix this side of Lynch. (Having a little more motion on the screen didn’t hurt either.) Rather than following a “plot,” the whole moved with nearly the abstractness of music.
In Alexandra – which could easily have been titled Grandmother and Grandson – Sokurov manages to seduce us into a dreamy mood even before the first image appears on screen. Over the black-and-white opening credits, we hear a blend of faint sound effects, a soprano singing on a distant radio, and heavy Tchaikovskian orchestral music. As we strain to decipher the sounds, we are transported inside the title character’s POV.
Alexandra (Galina Vishnevskaya) – a matronly woman, presumably in her 70s or 80s – is waiting for a train in a dusty Russian town. It’s no standard passenger train, but rather a rough-hewn troop transport, and a group of soldiers solicitously help her into what is barely more than an empty boxcar.
The images are all burnished, nearly monochromatic. Even though setting and behavior are within the bounds of reality, everything seems slightly off. People move just a tad slowly, as though Sokurov has ordered cinematographer Aleksandr Burov to overcrank the camera just a few frames per second. We linger on closeups half a beat too long.
Is it a dream? Is Alexandra the last evacuee in some near-future pogrom? Are the soldiers actually angels taking her into the afterlife?
Actually, none of these, as it turns out. Too old to get around much anymore, Alexandra is on her way for a visit – likely her last – with her grandson, Denis (Vasily Shevtsov), a Russian Army officer stationed in Chechnya. (The locale is never quite pinned down, but the movie was shot near Grozny, the Chechen capital, and once or twice the soldiers refer to the locals as Caucasians.) She arrives in the middle of the night, and you can viscerally feel her disorientation.
As always, Sokurov displays almost no interest in “plot.” Despite several ominous moments, nothing dramatic happens. Alexandra spends a few days at the camp, spends as much time as she can with Denis (who has to go off on missions), and visits the nearby town, where – despite the understandable hostility the locals feel toward Russians – she develops an instant bond with a woman (Raisa Gichaeva) roughly her own age.
Sokurov characterizes Alexandra as an antiwar film, yet we never literally see the war. We can sometimes hear it on the soundtrack, and every frame shows manifestations of a bellicose occupation – weapons; rough, prefab barracks; homesick soldiers; and, most emphatically, the simmering resentment of the younger locals, who seem ready to explode at any moment. War has so permeated everyone’s lives – the soldiers, the townspeople, even Alexandra – that it’s barely worth remarking on.
The setting is essentially realistic, but Sokurov’s style filters the realism through a haze that blurs the specifics, even while increasing the immediacy. Alexandra is our filter; she still seems willful and sharp-tongued, but age has taken a toll, and her trip isn’t helping. Suddenly transplanted from her home to an alien environment with 100-degree heat, she can’t stay awake and on her feet very long. She closes her eyes for a moment and opens them again to discover that the sun has fallen or risen. The audience, firmly located in her consciousness, shares her momentary befuddlement.
With so much detail, I may be doing the film a disservice by trying to convey in words an accomplishment that is almost wholly sensual rather than intellectual. The movie is anchored by Vishnevskaya’s utterly natural performance – all the more impressive when you consider that she is not a theatrical or film actress. She is, in fact, a venerated opera singer, whom Sokurov cast after making a documentary about her and her husband, the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich. She brings decades of a diva’s gravitas and stage presence to the screen.
It is not only Vishnevskaya, Sokurov, and cinematographer Burov who deserve credit for the film’s almost hallucinatory spell. The crucial sound design (uncredited) is in the vein of Gus Van Sant’s Elephant; its central element – the music by Andrei Sigle (who also co-produced) – is one of the most impressive orchestral scores in years, a throwback to the heavy romantic style that dominated Russian music in the late 19th and early 20th century. So accurate is Sigle’s recreation that at first I took it to be obscure snippets sampled from the catalogs of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.
Alexandra. Written and directed by Aleksandr Sokurov. With Galina Vishnevskaya, Vasily Shevtsov, and Raisa Gichaeva. Opens Friday at the Nuart.
Published: 04/09/2008
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