Elena (母親的罪愛)

The film Elena (2011), by Andrei Zvyaginstev, a young Russian director, opens with a lone crow perched upon a leafless tree outside a steel and glass modern Moscow suburban apartment, silent, observing the apartment. It cries. It is soon joined by another crow. The camera switches inside. It shows a dimly lit and sparsely but stylishly decorated and impeccably clean interior of the apartment, with austere leather and steel sofas, a tidy writing desk and chair: all straight lines and right angles and glistening surfaces. Then the camera shows a narrow single bed. An alarm clock rings. A figure under the sheets stirs. A fat arms reaches out and presses the stop button on top of the small electronic alarm clock . It belongs to a rather plump and ordinary looking lady in her late fifties or early sixties, Elena (Nadezhda Markina). She gets up, looks at herself in the mirror, adjust her hair, then goes into the kitchen, carefully prepares a meal on a tray. She brings it into another room with closed sliding doors. She knocks gently, enters and moves over gingerly to the side of an enormous bed, opens the curtains, gives a gentle poke on the figure under the blanket over the bed, an old man, and tells him its time to wake up. The old man is Vladmir (Andrei Smirnov). We learn later that they are in fact husband and wife, married for two years although they'd been together for 9 and sleep in separate rooms. The man used to be her patient at the hospital where she was working. She looks more a maid than a "wife".

We next see her dressing, taking a bus, then a train to visit her son, living in a run down state housing estate, close to three power plants. There we find a late thirty-ish man leaning against the metal railing on the verandah, smoking, looking at the courtyard below, but at nothing in particular. That's Sergei (Alexey Rozin),her son from a previous marriage. Inside, we find a baby barely more than a year old, trying to get up on the mattress of a bed whilst another teenager on the floor, his back against the wall of another small room, engaged in playing a video game. The young man enters the small crowded and messy sitting room, opens the frige and asks for another beer. Elena knocks on the door. No one answers. She had to call out the names of her son Sergei and then Sasha her grandson (Igor Ogurtsov) etc. It was obvious that it was a  family which didn't care about anything, including courtesy.

When the film ends, we see the same crows upon that same tree, except that inside that same apartment, we find Sergei (whom the old Vladimir had regularly supported by a monthly stipend) and the slob's pregnant wife and Sasha, his 16 year old hooligan son and another the baby girl. Vladimir had just died before he had time to make out a will after his discharge from  hospital following an earlier heart attack whilst swimming at a gymn. The day before he die, he indicated to Elena that he would like to make a will in which he would give everything to his hedonistic daughter Katya (Elena Lyadova) and would leave her a reasonable annuity for life. He died because along with his breakfast, his "wife" had given him some additional pills which she discovered from a pharmaceutical book in the bookshelf the previous day could never be taken with the pills prescribed by Vladimir's doctor upon his discharge. All his life, Vladimir had been very careful about earning money. As far as spending money is concerned, he adopts more or less the same but a slightly more generous approach. Perhaps because of his attitude, he has hardly any true friends. At least in the film, we don't see anyone calling him out  for drinks, meals, travels etc. But life plays tricks on or games with him. First his wife, then his daughter, all spends his hard earned cash something which he apparently does not mind and his second nurse-maid-wife even kills him for his money.

What caused the Elena to do what she did? About a week ago, Vladimir told her that after a week's careful consideration, he had decided to refuse her request that he help her 16-year-old grandson, Sasha , whom she knew had little interest in studies, because Sergei needed some bribe money to pay the relevant college official to secure a place for Sasha;s college entrance so that the latter can avoid the Russian army draft. Vladimir told Elena that there was no reason why her own son should not take up the responsibility as his own son's father for the welfare of Sasha and solve his own financial problem on his own. He said that for her sake, he had already been supporting Sergei regularly and there was no reason why he should bear the extra burden of supporting her grandson's education as well and added that if it were a question of Sergei or Sasha being in hospital, the money would be on her desk the next day. On that occasion, she tried to argue with him and said his own daughter, Katya (Elena Lyadova),.a loose living girl who drinks and even takes drugs (but for whose affection and love he still deeply craves), was also entirely dependent on him. He said that he was discussing her son's problem and that she should not drag in the way he treated his own daughter, which for him is an entirely separate issue. Katya in fact seldom gets in touch with her father and if it were not for his hospitalization and Elena's pleading for her to go see him because her husband had specifically asked her whilst on the hospital bed, to look for her after the heart attack in which he nearly died, she would probably never had gone to see him. When she went, we see how despite their differences, he daughter really still loved him.

The film. Zvyaginstev's third, having debuted with The Return in 2003, followed by The Banishment in 2007, all about family bonding, is a calm, matter of fact analysis of current social division between the rich and the poor: the hardworking, rational previous generation with the current irresponsible Russian younger generation, relying on state welfare or on their parents, incapable of self-reliance. It raises many questions: the conflict between reason and instinct for survival, between the rich and the poor, the effects of excessive parental affection for their offspring, economic and sexual exploitation of the poor by the rich and question of social and moral justice. It's done mostly in long static shots, a method which certainly gives the audience plenty of time for reflection. I like the music in the film by Philip Glass, endless repetition of a motif. Does that suggest that Elena is not just an individual but a paradigm of the doting mother except that once the interest of her brood is concerned, she would not hesitate o kill? Is her marriage to Vladimir not merely just a mutually convenient "arrangement": his cash in exchange for her companionship, house keeping and occasional  sex on the side? The film got 4 awards at this year’s Golden Eagle Awards in Moscow, for Best Film, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress and
Best Cinematography in January this year.