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Graeme is entranced by Sokurov's elegy on the pointlessness of war.

In Alexandra, a grandmother (played by 80 year-old Galina Vishnevskaya, soprano and widow of Mstislav Rostropovich), visits her grandson, a Russian army captain, at his camp in Chechnya. Her movements are slow, stately, at odds with the world of the armoured troop carrier, the goods train and the tank in which she must sit; a world of guns and iron and men. Likewise, her presence unsettles the soldiers’ routines and troubles their accepted borders. The soliders are awkward in her company, eager to please; many are no more than boys.

Filmed in khaki hues, with colour often leached from scenes by the bright sunlight and searing heat, Alexandra takes us to the heart of warfare. It was filmed near Grozny during the Chechen conflict, yet we see no fighting, hear no gunshots. The soldiers’ loneliness, their companionship, their fear, their pride, their youth, their longing and their unchannelled depths of tenderness render all such depictions redundant. As Sokurov says, Alexandra is not a film about the actual, but the eternal.

 

Graeme Hobbs on 10th December 2008
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