Uncommon Sense

Alexandra captures the sights, sounds and smells of war — from the perspective of a grandmother.

by Sam Adams

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As a troop train taking an old woman to meet her grandson in a battle zone nears its destination, the soundtrack of Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra mingles the clank of wheels with dissonant classical music that sounds like an orchestra preparing to play. But the music in Sokurov's movie never pushes its way to the front. It's always buried in the mix, fighting with the whir of helicopters and the clacking of automatic rifles. Galina Vishnevskaya, who plays the title role, is a legendary soprano, but she never sings a note. Indeed, she rarely opens her mouth, and when she does, the muttered half-phrases that spill out barely qualify as speech. What she does most frequently is observe, making her way through her grandson's camp and the adjacent town, her eyes impassively taking in soldiers and civilians, dusty tanks and blasted buildings, with a weariness that suggests she has already used up her life's supply of sorrow.

In her plain dresses and peasant scarves, Vishnevskaya calls up the stolid babushkas of Soviet propaganda, and perhaps even Mother Russia herself. She moves among the young soldiers, taking in their empty faces, and speaks to them as if they are all her flesh and blood. But while she is fascinated with what they have become, she seems unsure whether to be pleased or repelled. As her grandson shows her around the camp, she grabs an automatic rifle and hoists it to her shoulder, pulling the trigger and absorbing the satisfying click as the gun dry-fires. "It's so easy," she says, sounding impressed and saddened and perhaps a little excited, as well.

Like many of Sokurov's films, including his best-known, the one-shot wonder Russian Ark, Alexandra seems to take place in a fog, its images washed with a layer of sepia haze. As Alexandra rides a tank into the camp for the first time, the air behind her fills with white puffs of smoke, as if she is passing into another world. The drifting camerawork and echoing sound make every sensation feel as if it's passed through a layer of gauze before it reaches your sense organs. But if Sokurov downplays the immediacy of sight and hearing, it is only to give other senses room to function. The camera pushes in tight on pools of gun oil as if its viscous texture might ooze through the screen, and characters constantly take note of the camp's intense heat and vivid smells. "It's the guns, the iron, the men," says Alexandra's grandson (Vasily Shevtsov). "You get used to it."

Although Alexandra is almost anti-polemical in its gauzy lyricism, the movie's backdrop makes a powerful statement of its own. As Alexandra leaves the soldiers behind and wanders into town, she passes by buildings whose very existence seems like an optical illusion. A group of men chat idly while slabs of concrete dangle from wires two stories above their heads, as if the structure had been frozen in mid-collapse. The glares of rage she draws from teenage boys are articulation enough of the tension between them. There is only one overtly political sentence in the movie, uttered by a young Chechen as he escorts Alexandra back to camp, and it strikes with greater force for the movie's overall restraint.

Like her directorial namesake, Alexandra devotes much of her energy to looking, peering into tents full of soldiers and sifting through the wares at a Chechen market. But the movie is most startling when its subjects look back. Time and again, Sokurov rests on faces that stare dead into the camera, meeting its gaze without self-consciousness or apology. In the audience, you have the sensation of meeting them head on, an unsettling hint that they're looking right at you. The images of wartime deprivation aren't just there to be watched. They watch you, too.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)

Alexandra

Written and directed by Alexander Sokurov

A Cinema Guild release