Chilling “Elena” From the Depths of the Mysterious Russian Soul Comes to Bay Area Screens

By Emma Krasov

Elena, a new film by Andrey Zvyagintsev, who co-wrote the script with Oleg Negin, starts with a view of a Moscow apartment window, gradually colored by the light of dawn. The shot is so subtle that for a minute it looks like a still – until a crow on a bench next to the window slightly moves its head.

Subtlety permeates the action throughout the film, and makes the horror lurking in the masterfully-twisted plot only more jarring.

The main character, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) is a kindly Russian woman – round-faced, corpulent, solid; dressed modestly according to her grandmotherly age.

The kind of woman you’d ask for directions on the street, or for help should you suffer a sudden heart attack. Her non-threatening appearance immediately puts you at ease.

We learn that Elena, indeed, is a skilled nurse, now comfortably retired and recently married to her well-off former patient, Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov).

The couple lives an idyll in a centrally located spacious and beautifully decorated apartment. Each spouse has a daily routine, a set of not too burdensome responsibilities, and – a grown child from a previous marriage.

From what we gather, Vladimir’s daughter, Katerina (Elena Lyadova) leads a life of a spoiled brat and don’t even bother to call her dad until he gets into a hospital, and Elena begs the prodigal daughter to be kind to her father and show him some love. Unexpectedly, the bitter, sarcastic love is there – and that seems to be a problem…

Elena’s son, Sergey (Alexey Rozin) is very much in-touch with his mother. So much so that living in a shabby housing project on the outskirts of Moscow, and obviously jobless, he relies on her pension money to support his wife, Tatyana (Evgenia Konushkina), his teenage son, Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov) and a new baby.

Elena is a good wife, expectedly subservient to her rich husband, and a very good mother and grandmother. All her actions are motivated by motherly love (which at the end makes you question the morality of it – in the universal sense).

At the end, Elena the movie brings the anti-theses to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment character, which killed to find out “whether I was a louse like everybody else or a man.” In the film, lice don’t even question it – they just move in. The well-executed multiple award-winning film pointedly conveys the idea that in the modern-day struggle for survival it is not important any more to be a man.

Elena opens June 8 at Landmark in San Francisco, Shattuck in Berkeley, and Camera3 in San Jose. A Zeitgeist Film Release. More information: www.zeitgeistfilms.com