Alexander Sokurov has been nominated for the Palme D’Or at Cannes five times. To achieve something like that, a director must have a way with crafting strikingly original films, and while “Alexandra” may reek of a Disney high concept film on paper (What if your grandmother followed you out to your military base?), it achieves a level of uniqueness and tender emotion that I hadn’t expected.
The film follows an elderly Russian woman named Alexandra (Galina Vishnevskaya) traveling to a military base in Chechnya to visit her grandson Denis (Vasily Shevtsov) following the recent death of her husband. Denis has been away for seven years, and she’s “no good by herself.”
While on the base, she appears nurturing and tender, but more noticeably strong willed, independent and fussy in that perfectly lovable way a grandmother of any nationality can and should be. Vishnevskaya, 81 at the time of the film’s release, was once an opera singer in Russia, and now in her old age, she is inherently convincing as this frail woman who seems to be able to do anything and go anywhere and yet seems to eat and sleep less than the military boys around her. If she were Italian, she would uncannily remind me of my grandmother. In this way, Vishnevskaya doesn’t appear to be an actress who could handle many other roles, but the fact that she now gives that impression and actually has a rich history of fame in Russia is surprising and a testament to the quality of her work.
Wherever Alexandra goes in the film, she seems to stand out in the crowd, and with her she casts a sort of spell and attraction. There are a number of young soldiers who give her odd looks as though they too have been gone so long from home and simply seek someone to mother and fuss over them like they once were. Even when she meets a Chechen woman after she wanders to the market to buy some soldiers cigarettes and cookies, the other women of her age show her that natural hospitality loving grandmothers always do, a courtesy that has possibly escaped them for some time.
But the problem I had with “Alexandra” is that it seems like a collective vignette of a family drama with a war zone background, and yet it lacks a deeper substance to make a claim about war, life, family or death. Alexandra utters a few choice lines that subtly speak to those themes, like to a commanding officer about her grandson, she expresses her concern that he lacks a skill beyond shooting people for when he returns home from war. And to a Chechen boy who has guided her home, “Strength doesn’t come from weapons or from your hands.”
And because of the film’s unconventional storytelling methods, it seems to meander in its 92 minute running time, sort of like this elderly woman who seems out of place amidst this military base. Although it is Sokurov’s unconventional methods that make the film interesting in the first place. In that respect, “Alexandra” is by no means a bad film. It’s tough to recommend, but not because it is tough to watch or because it has nothing to say.
2 1/2 stars