According to the IMDB website, "It all started when a British producer proposed a project with four films made by four different directors, all touching upon the topic of apocalypse. For about a month, director Andrey Zvyagintsev and screenwriter Oleg Negin looked for a plot and found 'two or three curious concepts,' but then Negin phoned Zvyagintsev one night and suggested they should meet. At the meeting, he told Zvyagintsev almost the complete plot of the future film. The story is based on an incident from Negin's life."[Spoilers] Elena begins with a lengthy close-up of a tree outside a condo in a Russian city. In the tree sits an unmoving crow. There is no music and no apparent action other than the camera slowly racking focus from foreground branches to the background of the condo. Just as a second bird arrives on the tree, the director/author Andrey Zvyagintsev cuts to a long shot in the elegant Scandinavian-looking modern apartment. The audience is used to faster cuts and shorter establishing shots during a film’s opening. Where Zvyagintsev takes close to 30 beats, Americans would have compressed them into 15 beats. Since the only ambient sound is the crowing of the birds, we wait expectantly for something to happen. We see the main character Elena (beautifully and richly played by Nadezhda Markina) asleep in her separate bedroom. She opens her eyes and then rather slowly gets up and begins her daily routine. She has done this over and over, and there is no sense of joy seen. She awakens her husband of two years in his bedroom and fixes him breakfast while he shaves and dresses. Nothing much happens for the first fifteen minutes. For me this was a very Russian film in mood and pacing. We are sitting in Anton Chekhov’s world reset in a modern Soviet city.
As writers like Chekhov in the 1880s developed their view of
Naturalism, they called for a new drama which would not follow the dramatic
gestures of the Classical period. Says an enotes.com essay:
Affected by the past, leading to some unseen future, the present with all its complexities and uncertainties is the stuff of which Chekhov's plays are made. Life as it is really lived, rather than highly melodramatic and theatrical incidents, Chekhov insisted, is the proper subject for plays. "After all, in real life," he observed, "people don't spend every minute shooting at each other, hanging themselves, and making confessions of love. They don't spend all the time saying clever things. They're more occupied with eating, drinking, flirting, and talking stupidities—and these are the things which ought to be shown on the stage. A play should be written in which people arrive, go away, have dinner, talk about the weather, and play cards. Life must be exactly as it is, and people as they are.… Let everything on the stage be just as complicated, and at the same time just as simple as it is in life. People eat their dinner, just eat their dinner, and all the time their happiness is being established or their lives are being broken up."
We can see Chekhovian elements of this in the Elena plot. Elena
and her husband Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) share a mundane breakfast. She goes
shopping. She travels on various transportations. We see her and her family watch
television shows which deal with, among other things, selecting the best fake
sausage and how to choose a spouse.
Vladimir, Elena’s husband is rich (a retired scientist who went into business when the Soviet Union collapsed); Elena comes from a
working middle class where she was a nurse until her marriage to Vladimir two
years before. She argues with Vladimir over money. She wants him to loan her
son Sergey (Aleksey Rozin) money. He says if they couldn’t afford to take care
of their family why did they have the new baby. She points out that each of
them was an accident. Vladimir shakes his head in disgust.
As they go off to their separate activities, Elena travels quite
a distance to see Sergey, a son by a previous marriage who lives in a squalid low
rent slum housing unit near a nuclear plant, with his wife, teenage slacker
son Sasha, and baby. When she arrives, her son
is standing staring off in the distance having a cigarette. This is a man who
doesn’t work. He smokes and spits off the balcony, while her slacker grandson mirrors
his father by playing video games. A family living in poverty, they center
their life on potato chips, nuts, and television.
Elena brings Sergey and family money, which he immediately
puts part in one pocket and the money for his wife and family in another. They complain
to Elena that they need a sizeable amount of money to buy grandson Sasha a
way into college so he could stay out of the army. He is obviously totally
unmotivated and appears pretty vacant. Elena focuses on the baby and refuses to
see what her child and grandchild are really like.
Elena’s dilemma is how to get the money needed for the
grandson since Vladimir is the only one seemingly with money. She tries to
convince him to help, but he begrudges an earlier loan that the son has never
repaid. We see her struggle with her emotions as she chastises him for helping
his daughter who she feels is not worth helping, but it only makes him dig in
more. Elena plays the dutiful wife and knows when to pull back.
Elena’s salvation comes when Vladimir has a heart attack at
his gym in the swimming pool. She puts on a show of caring by going to a local
church and asking which saint to pray to for help, but she obviously knows
little of the church.
When Vladimir comes home for recovery, she returns to the
role of his nurse which she had played 10 years before. He seals his fate when
he tells Elena that he has decided to make out a new will giving his daughter
everything and leaving only an annuity for her. He asks her to react, but he
knows she won’t because she is brow-beat by him. The pragmatist Elena sees what
must be done. Knowing her husband still enjoys sex, she checks out the warnings
about Viagra and then gives Vladimir two pills with his daily medicine. While
she waits for him to die, she shows signs of remorse but never tries to save
him. Does Elena care for Vladimir? She
doesn’t allow herself to deal with those feelings. The mother instinct to
protect her brood trumps whatever thoughts she manages toward her husband.
After Vladimir’s death, Elena clears the safe of all money.
She learns that because Vladimir had no will, she will get an equal portion to
what his daughter will inherit. She takes the cash to her son, this time riding
a train. The train kills a man and his horse, but we are left hanging about how
this fits the plot. At the tenement, she gives her children the money. The
couple tell her that they are expecting
another baby. (I felt myself reacting like Vladimir: the son can’t work, but he
can father kids he can’t support.)
The lights in the building suddenly go out. While we wait for
this to take meaning, we ask whether there will finally be retribution. Will Sasha’s hooligan friends come into the darkened apartment and steal the
money that was left in the kitchen? Instead, Sasha runs out to join his
buddies in a rumble with another hooligan gang living by the water coolers of
the power plant, and he gets beaten up. The black-out apparently serves no purpose other than to show
how uncertain life is there.
At the end, Elena’s family is living with her in Vladimir’s
apartment, totally out of their element. Sergey’s immediate suggestion is that
they could add a wall and give Sasha his own room. The baby is left on Vladimir’s
bed, an ironic touch because of Vladimir’s distain for it. The rest of the
family end up grouping around the television. Sasha stands on the balcony
and watches the local workers play soccer.
The film bookends with the same shot of the tree and the
crows. A couple of my friends saw the ending as positive, with hope that the
babies will have a better life ahead. I disagree. No one in the family other
than Elena is really capable or willing to work. One
friend pointed out that Elena’s daughter will now be there to help, but all I can see is the squalor of
their earlier apartment which suggests that it hadn’t been cleaned in a long
time.
For me the point is that Elena and her family are like the
crows… scavengers who will opportunistically feed off others and move on. The
upper class apartment has become the home for Gorky’s Lower Depths squatters.
Afterthought: of special note is the soundtrack which begins with only ambient sound, crows screeching, foley sounds of people walking, etc. About 15 minutes into the film some Phillip Glass music is played. It has a sinister, forboding sound which led many to assume something evil was going to happen. It does, but there is no sense of retribution. Really interesting use of sound here. You get an idea of the music from the trailer below.
Elena (2011) **** (The more I've thought about this film, the more I like it.)
