Elena (N/R)

Time Out says

Tue May 15 2012

Starkly depicting the massive disparities of wealth that are the central subject of modern-day Russia, Andrei Zvyagintsev’s bold morality tale asks a thorny question under the guise of a sleek near-thriller. Our title heroine (the absorbingly reserved Nadezhda Markina), a former nurse, lives in a glinting paradise: Her onetime patient, wealthy Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), has taken her for his own in his luxurious, glass-walled Moscow apartment. Elena goes out on occasion to visit her slovenly adult son from a previous marriage, Sergey (Aleksey Rozin); the doomed realities of his family’s flea-bitten conditions unnerve her. Old Vladimir remains unsympathetic to giving a loan, however, and when he suffers a serious relapse (his hard-partying estranged daughter swoops in for the money), Elena faces a dark, murderous choice.

Rarely do movies—never mind foreign ones, of any nationality—explore an honest-to-God ethical quandary. Elena, in its concentrated austerity, often resembles a lost chapter of Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Ten Commandments–themed Decalogue. Zvyagintsev (whose 2003’s feature debut, The Return, unspooled with magnificent tension) could have benefitted from the Polish director’s self-imposed hour-long running time: Elena feels a touch repetitive right when it should be tightening the screws. But its fatalism is contagious. Climactically, the electricity cuts out and we all look upward, guiltily.

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Author: Joshua Rothkopf