Babusya

A doleful treatise on post-communist Russia's dereliction of its old, Babusya isn't always subtle (the last act plays somewhere between lugubrious polemic and a bad joke), but it's pretty credible. It's the story of a widowed grandmother, a veteran of the siege of Leningrad, bounced from domestic pillar to post after she loses her old home. It's not that her entire family are grasping materialists or drunken bums, yet fortune doesn't seem to favour the loyal. The story takes a while to find its feet, and it's actually the earlier scenes, casting a wry eye over the quirks of provincial village life in the bleak Russian winter, that are the most intriguing. They also afford some lustrous landscape photography.