Cannes: "Alexandra"

Alexander Sokurov's latest feature is his most conventional film in recent memory. He doesn't use any (obviously) distorted lenses; he doesn't diffuse the light to create a dusty fog. By Hollywood standard, the cutting's not quick, but it does fall into a steady patter, and there are even some exchanges of dialogue that are textbook medium-shot/reverse medium shot affairs. A scene in a Chechen open-air marketplace in which the colors desaturate to a sandy near-monochrome is about as visually outre as things get here.

The lean (93-minute) picture depicts the film's titular grandmother (opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, who was married to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich until his death in April) visiting her army officer grandson at a Russian army camp in Chechen territory. Riding out in an armored train, Alexandra grouses a bit, and she does so a little more when presented with her quarters at the camp. She's a bit stern in that way you imagine Russian grandmothers would be, but she exerts a strange charm on the people she meets. She chastises her happy-to-see-her but distant grandson (Vasily Shestov) about not taking care of herself; she's weirdly dismissive of the soldiers guarding the checkpoint when she meets them while out for a stroll. But the next day she goes to the open-air market outside the camp to buy them cigarettes and sundries, and she befriends Malika, a woman her own age (Raisa Gichaeva), who brings Alexandra to her bombed-out apartment house.

The dominant atmosphere in the Chechen ruins and in the miserable camp is one of stalemate. Nobody wants to be where they are (well, the Chechens do, but they want to be there under better conditions), nobody wants to be doing what they're doing. But there they are. Not a shot is fired in this antiwar film; what Sokurov is up to here is bringing to light the tedious oppression of occupation. The feeling is not so much that violence could break out at any second than that everybody's too tired to fight. The most the young Chechen teens at the open-air market do is refuse service to anyone Russian. Sokurov conveys the tedium without succumbing to it. Conventional as it may seem, this is actually one of his most subtle pictures.