Elena: character-driven drama labours under issues of class, gender, alienation and spiritual emptiness

Andrey Zviagintsev, “Elena” (2011)

A stylistically beautiful yet minimal film about class, alienation and the moral and spiritual emptiness of materialism in a country as much disillusioned with capitalism as it was with Communism, “Elena” is a character-driven domestic drama revolving around an elderly couple and their parasitic relatives. Years ago, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) and Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) met in a hospital as nurse and patient respectively; they fell in love, moved in together, married several years later and now lead a humdrum life together as a retired couple in a luxury apartment in an unnamed Russian city. Sometimes they have sex but only if Vladimir remembers to take some Viagra.

The two have problems with their errant offspring. Elena’s unemployed and hard-up son Sergei (Alexei Rozin) lives in a distant and very slummy part of the city with his wife Tanya and two children, one of whom is a teenager who spends his days playing computer games, hanging out with the local hoods and bashing homeless men for fun, and getting in trouble for poor grades at school. The day is fast approaching when he’ll be called up for army duty (and everyone knows that new recruits are bullied mercilessly and violently); the only alternative to the draft is if his parents can cough up the money to pay for college, to which most people would say to Sergei and Tanya: Dream on!!! In the meantime the wealthy Vladimir waits for his dissolute unmarried daughter Katya (Elena Lyadova) to phone him now and again but the hedonistic hussy is happy only to sponge off him to continue her partying ways.

One day while exercising at the gym, Vladimir suffers a heart attack and has to stay in hospital for a few days. He realises he hasn’t much time left and mentally starts making arrangements about preparing his will. Elena contacts Katya and urges her to visit Vladimir: the father and daughter have a reunion and Vladimir determines that he will leave all his assets to Katya and Elena will only get a monthly allowance out of his wealth. He tells Elena of his decision, leaving her in despair as to how she, let alone her family whom she has been lending money to (and of whom Vladimir deeply disapproves), will survive. She looks at the Viagra tablets and other medication Vladimir must take and a plan quickly forms in her mind …

The film does groan with the weightiness of the issues Zviagintsev has loaded it with and it’s to the actors’ credit, most of all Markina’s, that they wear the themes lightly and naturally. There is a class issue here and the mentalities that go with it, to the extent that the characters are virtual stereotypes of these mentalities. Vladimir represents the self-made businessman (some of whose wealth might have been acquired in an underhand Yeltsin-era asset-stripping way) and expresses mercenary, dog-eat-dog values; his cynical daughter Katya sees how materialism has poisoned Dad, herself and their relationship yet is content to continue in a personally nihilistic way. Elena is a product of old school Soviet socialism and egalitarianism and in a sense Sergei and his family are both beneficiaries and victims of the social welfare state at its worst: as long as the system supports them, Sergei and Sasha see no reason to work and improve their lot in life. There is also a gender issue: Vladimir treats Markina more as a servant than a wife and Sergei treats her as a money spigot. As in the old Soviet times, the women in the movie, apart from Katya who does not appear very much, labour at keeping their families together and ensuring the survival of children and grandchildren.

The plot is sparse and rather banal; the acting and the film’s minimal style save it from the danger zone of boredom. The characters live unexciting and repetitive lives and only something out of the ordinary, in this case Vladimir’s cardiac arrest, slings  everyone into another direction completely. Yet the plot’s resolution, which in a Western film would be treated as happily-ever-after, is ambiguous: Sergei’s family is lifted out of poverty in fairy-tale fashion but it’s not a foregone conclusion that he and Sasha realise they have been given another chance and it’s very likely that they’ll squander their good fortune completely long before they have squandered Elena’s long-suffering patience.

Contemporary Russia is a revelation for those Western audiences brought up to believe that Vladimir Putin has plunged it back into the Cold War days of authoritarian and repressive rule. Elena and Vladimir have a comfortable life together and enjoy all the modern conveniences Vladimir’s money can buy. Yet their lives and those of their children are still empty: the TV shows they watch – endless football, soap operas, reality TV shows – and their leisure pursuits reflect the spiritual and moral voids within. Significantly only Katya recognises this loss and her awareness of it leads her to an understanding with her father which in turn reconciles them together in the most moving scene in the film.

The cleverness of the plot’s twists and turns makes Elena less of a noble Soviet-style heroine and Katya deserving of some sympathy than her character portrait would initially suggest. Everyone in the film turns out to be small-minded and mean in some way and practically no-one is without moral fault. Elena appears a saint but her shy and submissive demeanour masks quite a manipulative and scheming character. Nadezhda Markina’s achievement is to make Elena appear innocent and caring enough that her actions become understandable though no less reprehensible for all that has happened to her.

“Elena” is filmed in a beguilingly artful and simple style: shots are very long and force viewers to listen carefully to background noise ambience (the film’s introductory scenes bear comparison with those of Andrei Tarkovsky’s famous “Stalker”) and background scenes in the two parts of the city where Elena and Sergei live are dramatic visual studies of the socio-economic gulf that exists between them. Much of the film is silent and it is the silent scenes that are the most emotional: Elena and Katya try to be stoic and to come to terms with what their respective (and certainly divergent) futures may bring. Philip Glass’s repetitive and dramatic music score is at once emphatic, moody and sort of po-faced, not revealing much but portentous all the same.

It’s an interesting film that portrays the void in the brave new materialist world of Putin’s Russia. Whatever value Western viewers derive from “Elena” depends on their understanding and sympathy for the old socialist values of the Soviet Union and the secular, competitive values of modern Russia, and how people like Elena, Sergei, Tanya and Katya cope with being caught between these two polarised universes. Zviagintsev places a lot of hope in Sergei and Tanya’s baby son, privileged with an extended shot all to himself and representing Russia’s future, in negotiating a successful path between the old Communist ways and the new capitalist expectations.

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