Alexandra

Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra focuses on a woman finding her way in an alien world and it leaves us to infer much from what were obliquely shown. The heroine, frail and elderly (played by the celebrated 81-year-old opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya), comes from Russia to Chechnya to see her 27-year-old grandson Dennis, a career officer serving with an infantry regiment. Shes an imperious grande dame, expecting to be treated with reverence, and there is a distance between her and the battle-hardened Dennis, though we can always sense love trying to break through.

Alexandra drifts around the camp, a disturbing and humanising figure in this bleak world of men fighting far from home in a desperate war that will never be won. We never see the war itself, just blazing fires illuminating the distant mountains, though the old woman pushes her way into the nearby town and meets kindly Chechen women and sullen, puzzled teenage boys living in the rubble. Less oblique and more approachable than most Sokurov films, it moves in a circle between the elderly heroines arrival and departure on an armoured train, a form of transport once associated with the heroism of the Russian Revolution, but now a vehicle of fear and oppression.