London Film Fest 2011 Day 7 - ELENA

Russian auteur Andrewi Zvyagintsev (THE BANISHMENT, THE RETURN) has crafted a tense, deliciously minutely observed character drama in ELENA. It begins slowly with the quiet observation of a quietly luxurious but emotionally empty life. A sixty-ish neat woman, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) is more like a live-in maid to her rich husband Vladimir (Andrei Smirnov), although later we will see that there is real intimacy and sympathy between them. Still, for all that, Vladimir holds Elena at a distance, she isn't family in thee same way as his dissipated and angry daughter Katya - again a rounded character - she hates her father but they also share real sympathy. And if Elena comes second to Katya - as is made clear in the will he tells Elena he is about to sign - Vladimir has even less time for Elena's wastrel son and grandson, who live in a crummy Soviet era apartment, sponging off Elena for cash. With a few brief but effective scenes, we learn that Elena is a good woman, who cares deeply for her family, and completely believe in her desperate actions as the film reaches it's final third. 

ELENA is thus a psychological study of compelling credibility but also a fascinating look at the contrast between those who have made it in the new Russia and those still living in comparative poverty in the old Soviet structures. The implied social critique is that in a society of graft, success comes to those who play the game. Vladimir played it in his way and now Elena, her possibilities circumscribed by her age, gender and situation, must take her chances too. The power of the film comes from the superb central performances in combination with Mikhail Krichman's camerawork and Zvyagintsev's framing of the luxurious apartment and the claustrophobic Soviet block. This is also one of the rare occasions where I really responded to a Philip Glass, and didn't find it overwhelming.

ELENA played Cannes where Andrew Zvyagintsev won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize. It also played Moscow, Toronto and London 2011. It was released in Russia last month and opens in France on March 7th 2012.

Late Review - MR NICE

Director Bernard Rose takes a break from contemporising Russian literature, with his straight-ahead adaptation of Howard Marks' autobiography, MR NICE. The charm of Marks' story is that he stands against the cliché of the drug dealer typically seen in films. He doesn't grow up in a mean urban setting - he doesn't push drugs to survive - he isn't particularly flash - he doesn't do whores - he's faithful to his wife and kids - and he studiously avoids Class A drugs - both dealing them and taking them. In fact, he is rather more like a hero of an Ealing Comedy - stumbling into drug dealing quite by accident and permanently amused that he is getting away with it.

Marks was basically just another middle-class kid studying at Oxford and smoking hash when a mate asked him to do a favour and drive a car stuffed with drugs back from Germany. Marks was quite happy to quit teaching for easy money-making and soon hooked up with the Provos to bring his hash into UK airports without the inconvenience of customs checks. Before long he's got the biggest outfit in the UK and tries to crack America. Moreover, he's been recruited by his old college chum to be a spy in Kabul - after all, he moves in circles they can't penetrate! The first time he's busted for dealing he gets off on grounds so spurious he seems to be amazed, but he does eventually serve time - and not because of hubris, or narcissism, or betrayal - but basically because he was too bored to quit.

The film is charming and fun, and uses a deliberately lo-fi amateurish style, with live action footage digitally inserted into grainy old vintage footage of the 60s and 70s. Rhys Ifans is suitably bumbling and charming as Marks and he and Chloe Sevigny as his wife seem genuinely in love. I also love David Thewlis - who has just that edge of danger required to play the Provo, Jim McCann. The charm and the fun is entirely in keeping with Marks' carefully cultivated persona as Mr. Nice. Yes, that was his real alias, but he also wants to be seen as basically a good guy. To that end, this movie drips with family values, and to watch it, one would think that his wife and daughters never blamed him for one second for being absent from their lives. The film also refuses to question how far his involvement with the Provos was morally pretty nasty - after all, the dodgy money they were earning wasn't going into real estate, was it? And there is a deliberately cultivated equivocation about how far he ever really did any spying for the British.

So, MR NICE is basically a rather fawning film - frothy, light, charming, disposable. It doesn't get to grips with Howard Marks - but provides him with a yet another self-justificatory platform. Is that bad? Who knows. But there is something rather, well, distasteful in an international drug dealer who consorted with the IRA palming himself of as a charming rogue.

MR NICE is currently on release in the UK.