"Elena": Murderous Rightful Heir

Hollywood loves to explore the boundaries and limits of the human morality and spirit. Usually with extreme situations that turn mundane days into life-or-death dilemmas. Someone has to stop a train from crashing, or an asteroid from destroying the Earth, or doing the humanly impossible to save the love of their life. When everyday necessities are taken for granted, we need bigger and wilder risky events to test the characters and the audience, in order to question  them how far would they go to get what they want. Andrey Zvyagintsev is a Russian filmmaker who enjoys placing his characters in situations that command them to make difficult choices to survive; however, his character's distress is way more grounded in reality, sometimes a bit too much. His family dramas show a different face of Russian  modern society. Away from the rural settings, Zygaintsev is more preoccupied with class withing urban Moscow. The distribution of wealth is crucial in his most recent film "Elena' , a story about who-deserves-what, and how far would someone go to take "justice" in their own hands. Zvyagintsev, as in his previous "The Return", likes to discuss the responsibility of parental figures in the lives of their children. In "Elena" the descendants from both sides of the story seem entitled, and behave like all-consuming parasites; but for a mother, the blind love for her children is such an unquestionable truth that surpasses any ethical conventions.

Elena (Nadezhda Markina) lives in the better part of Moscow, in a state of the art flat that is provided by her husband/patient  Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov), who is a rich man that met Elena as she was taking care of him as his nurse. Their marriage is a clash between classes. She is a working class woman, and he is a cynical millionaire. Although it seems like Elena is well adapted to her life in the suburbs, she still must go back to the bad part of town where her son's family lives. Elena is torn between the comfort she enjoys, and the precarious situations his son and grandchildren must endure. Inevitably, as most mothers would, she tries to help them financially, but when it becomes too much for her she decides to ask her husband for additional funds. Vladimir argues that she shouldn't finance her son's life, that as a grown man he must provide for his family. The contradiction here, is that Vladimir also has an older daughter from his previous marriage, who he supports and grants all material desires. As Vladimir falls sick and decides to write a will that will not be in favor of Elena, she must take extreme measures to make sure this doesn't happen. Katerina (Elena Lyadova), Vladimir's daughter, and Sergey (Aleksey Rozin), Elena's son are not so different. They are both purposeless adults that clench on their parents to advance, in the end its hard to say if justice was served in the film, as neither of them seem deserving of Vladimir's fortune or Elena's sacrifice.

Zvyagintsev creates a concise drama about the destiny of those in the outskirts of the economic spectrum, and the disconnect with those well-off. Markina's character serves as a bridge between the two, living in a spacious penthouse, while going back to an impoverished apartment complex, barely suitable for living. Elena's tormentous decision is made in part to be able to afford a college education for her grandson, who we see might end up in a life of crime if he doesn't get a chance. In a sense she is trying to revert what happened with her own Sergey, who became a entitled man, one more in the unemployment line. Whose fault is it? The government's? Society's? The parents'? In a crucial scene that might at first seem out of place. As Elena comes to Sergey to inform him of the "good news", Aleksandr, her grandson, is seen taking part of a violent gang fight from which he manages to escape alive. It makes the audience wonder what would happen with all those young men. The film's theme is more much universal, the abandoned youth of every country are the ones who reinforced the lines of crime, or those who must face  unproductive lives, because they were depraved from the start of a chance at escalating the social ladder. Then from this point of view Elena becomes a redemptive force, a sort of Robin Hood character in modern Russian society, but at what cost?, she is indeed the murderous rightful heir. The film succeeds at provoking questions like such, thus inquiring on our moral definitions of right and wrong. Well acted, specially Markina as Elena, and with intriguing visuals underscored by a mysterious soundtrack, the film is a great gem in the vault of modern Russian cinema.

Overall, the film works as a social meditation on class and responsibility, but it seems as if sometimes its solemn tone takes the best from it, and places it in an all-too-real place that doesn't always work for it. I believe that if Russia would focus its efforts in promoting smaller, more intimate films like this in the world's cinematic stage they would be more successful. In recent years they have attempted to promote Hollywoodesque action/sci-fi productions that don't always sit well with foreign audiences. Perhaps if they take a look at the core of the Russian emotional state in film, they could find a great niche of stories like the one that is depicted in "Elena". Out on DVD now, and also to watch instantly on Netflix. Grade B+