Alexander Sokurov’s latest film, Alexandra (Aleksandra), derives its understated humor from its narrative premise: an elderly woman from St. Petersburg visits her grandson, an officer stationed in an army base in Chechnya. This, in and of itself, is already humorous in its faintly comic juxtapositions, as we see her barrelling stubbornly through the barracks, handling an AK-47, clambering in and out of tanks, complaining about how the soldiers don’t wash. One touching element is how it seems all the soldiers — all boys, really — are eyeing her almost hungrily; it’s a hunger, all right, but not for generic female contact, but a precisely maternal one.
And so it continues in this quietly funny vein, until there’s a jarring scene of the grandmother walking alongside the occupying army’s rumbling tanks, and shots of apartment buildings with the ceilings caved in from bombing, and you realize there is a good chunk of the world for which this is normal. At any rate, the film slowly builds up to its inevitable anti-war message, but it’s a complicated and ambiguous one like its characters. Alexandra herself is part of the occupation, after all, and even if she feels a kindred sisterly spirit with the Chechen women, she neither receives nor demands absolution — not from the viewer, in any case.
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