Film

One of the few roaring lions still producing genuine art-house cinema, Russian director Alexander Sokurov prefers the sort of deliberate pace that tests ADD-afflicted viewers. This isn’t an opinion: He’s an unapologetic practitioner of crafting “difficult” films, and a proud member of a slow-and-low legacy that extends from Antonioni to Akerman, from Tarkovsky to Tarr.

So to laud Sokurov’s latest film for being accessible is faint praise, as if the fact that you don’t need a Ph.D. in Russian history to watch it constitutes its worthiness. Alexandra’s story of an elderly woman (Vishnevskaya) who visits a remote military outpost may seem more straightforward than the director’s usual knotty, gnostic parables, but it’s neither simplistic nor a sellout. Even though Sokurov brings the characteristic symbolism—he might have titled this Mother Russia and Her Sons—the emotional aspects aren’t overshadowed by the intellectual ones. The balance makes all the difference.

As Alexandra tours the grounds where her grandson (Shevtsov) is stationed (the location is never specified, but it’s obviously Chechnya), the filmmaker paints a delicate portrait of soldiering: the banality of barrack life, the way machinery takes spatial precedence over human beings. The “enemy” is also given a face and a voice, but politics eventually plays second fiddle to the bond between the woman and her ward. That’s where the heart of Sokurov’s moving allegory beats loudest, paying off in a climactic sequence of hair-braiding that boils down nationalistic nurturing to a single tender, devastating gesture.