ELENA – review

WINNER of the Special Jury Prize in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, this riveting, nail-biter of a thriller centres on a dowdy, downtrodden housewife, forced to use all her smarts to hang on to the inheritance a passionless marriage once promised.

Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyaginstev (THE RETURN) pulls out the stops with all the noirish skill he can muster, and the results are extraordinary. The focus is squarely on eponymous heroine Elena (Nadezhda Markina), who battles against her husband’s growing disdain towards an increasingly displaced family. Having grown tired of his wife’s hopeless son (Alexey Rozin) and his cash-seeking family, ailing businessman Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) opts to leave his fortune to his estranged and wholly unpleasant daughter (Yelena Lyadova), who has little time for Elena’s working-class roots (and the idea of her benefitting from her father’s will).

Elena, it transpires, was once Vladimir’s nurse. And the gradual transformation, once she treks from the relatively sleek inner-city life she shares with Vladimir to the bleak wasteland locale where her son’s family live, is profound. To enforce the point, a cracking Hithcockian score from Philip Glass helps to ratchet up the tension, as Elena realises her place at her husband’s table is fast-becoming compromised.  It’s a thoroughly modern twist on the classic noir, framed for our modern times in contemporary Moscow, where the gap between the have’s and the have not’s is stark.

Given Russia’s recent history – and the Oligarchs who benefitted from it – Zvyaginstev’s film is clearly a metaphor for the masses, left to fend for themselves in increasingly impoverished conditions. With the outlook for Europe’s economies appearing grimmer by the day – and a similarly divided landscape in the US not far away – the net is metaphorically cast even wider.

It is, then, a parable for our modern age. Facing the prospect of a dystopian future, and with governments appearing to ignore them, what else can the masses do except turn to increasingly desperate methods to be heard? Australia may seem far removed from such global turmoil – for the time being, at least – but such widespread concerns remain very real and relevant, even on our far and distant shores. That a filmmaker has crafted such an exemplary and entertaining means of addressing it only reinforces the point. Art, as always, seems to flourish best in the most adverse of surrounds.

Critical Rating: 9/10.

ELENA is in cinemas from Thursday.

ED GIBBS

First published in The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age.