From: MSN NicknameEagle_wng  (Original Message)    Sent: 11/25/2007 7:58 AM

Central Partnership

Masha Shalayeva plays a young girl with relationship troubles in "The Mermaid."

War's Female Face

Galina Vishnevskaya stars in powerful

Chechen drama "Alexandra," while "The

Mermaid" is another whimsical tale

from Anna Malikyan.

By Tom Birchenough
Published: November 23, 2007

Galina Vishnevskaya's title role in Alexander Sokurov's new film, "Alexandra," is little short of extraordinary. For those used to see her as an elegant, elderly opera diva, her transformation into a simple grandmother who travels to Chechnya to visit her grandson speaks volumes, as much for the film's silences as for its script -- incidentally, the first the director has written himself. Glances and gazes most often come to replace words.

Vishnevskaya plays a woman whose every movement attests to a hard life, and an equally hard present. Her hair is grey -- you suspect as much from exhaustion as anything else -- and she seems to shuffle slowly rather than walk. Sokurov's film catches two days in her life, spent largely in a Russian army garrison in Grozny (where location shooting took place). She hasn't seen her grandson (Vasily Shevtsov), an officer, in seven years, and their emotional reunion is certainly warm, but there are other elements central to the film.
First, there's her interaction with her grandson's fellow soldiers, officers and rank conscripts, as she tries to absorb the world in which he lives -- their everyday absorption in the details of military life, with its apparent separation from the surrounding world; their everyday fears and concerns, and the bonding between them. Her question to one of the force's commanders -- "You know how to destroy, but do you know how to build?" -- rings as insightfully as any depiction of war.

Then she walks out of the protection of the army base, and wanders through the surrounding town, half-wrecked as it is, to end up at the local market. Exhausted by this stage, she is taken home by a local trader, Malika (Raisa Gichayeva), to recuperate and the two interact as they reflect on their respective lots and the consequences that the war has brought to both their worlds. This encounter with Malika, a former school teacher, is one of the strongest episodes in the film.

On the following day she departs back to whatever her home life may be -- it's left pretty unspecific -- unlikely ever to see her grandson again. It's already been noted that Sokurov's visual imagery in his treatment of Vishnevskaya's character recalls the Mother Russia character in the iconic World War II recruitment poster, "The Motherland Calls."


Karoprokat
Galina Vishnevskaya put aside her habitual glamour to act in "Alexandra."
    
The director has spoken of a universal theme, saying that the film is about war in general as much as it is about the Chechen conflict in particular. Nevertheless, the specific details we see on screen are certainly convincingly local. Although we don't actually see the conflict itself, its atmosphere seems in some way to be absorbed through the viewer's pores, etching its way into our consciousness.

He has also said it's not a political work, an assertion that many may consider debatable, given the strength of the impressions left by the film. We come to feel the heat and the smell of the barracks, not least conveyed through a range of muted visual colors, and a very particular and sensitive musical score by Andrei Sigle.

Sokurov has depicted conflict in the past, both in the Caucasus and Afghanistan, but in a much more elliptical way than here. In other films, especially "Mother and Son" from 1997, he has focused on extremely close family relationships, where the relationship itself seems to be the film's subject rather than the (often minimal) plot line.

In "Alexandra," both strands seem to feature, and they meld together convincingly, rather than clash. Sokurov's take on war appears to be that conflicts pass, even if it is only after long decades; the resulting exhaustion for everyone involved certainly comes through here. Last year, Sokurov worked on one of his documentary projects, "Elegy," with Vishnevskaya and her late husband, Mstislav Rostropovich, and conceived the role of "Alexandra" for the actress. It's a collaboration that proves spectacular.

It can only be hoped that its release doesn't overshadow another new film, "The Mermaid," from sophomore director Anna Melikyan, whose first film "MARS" from three years ago strongly impressed this critic and went on to gain considerable international festival attention. The "second film" syndrome, whereby a director who has scored strongly with a first work struggles to maintain impetus in their follow-up, may be at work here -- but frankly that's only because "MARS" was just very good indeed.

"The Mermaid" resounds with some elements of Melikyan's debut -- quirkiness, some elements that approach the surreal, and something of a final melancholy -- a fairy tale without a happy ending. Her very personable heroine, Alisa (Masha Shalayeva), speaking largely through first-person narration, looks eccentric, not least when she dyes her hair green.

And she's got reason to be that way, growing up at the seaside (locations are not specified, but a hunch suggests it's somewhere on the Black Sea). Her mother (Maria Sokova) is a large lady who's completely unable to keep a man, not even the father of her daughter, a passing seaman who never returns. Her grandmother, meanwhile, is an endearingly eccentric old bird, with one of those Caucasian faces that speak volumes through their lines and expressions.

When that (relative) idyll is disrupted, the trio moves to Moscow. Here, Alisa comes, by chance, into the strange world of the apparently glamorous Sasha (Yevgeny Tsyganov) -- glamorous except for the fact that his drinking drives him to depression, which means he tries to jump into the river and to walk across busy highways. His day job appears somehow connected with advertising and he also sells land plots on the moon.

Melikyan repeats the clever use of music found in "MARS" and a visual style backed up by designer Ulyana Ryabova, who worked on both films. It's a mood piece that may seem slightly less "formed" than the director's debut -- which leaves you wondering what her next project will be.

"Alexandra" and "The Mermaid" (Rusalka) are playing at theaters citywide.
 
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2007/11/23/110.html