7.2 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Sixty-ish spouses Vladimir and Elena share his luxurious Moscow apartment. He's a wealthy businessman; she's his former nurse who has clearly "married up." Estranged from his own hedonistic daughter, Vladimir has no respect for his wife's unemployed son, who is constantly seeking handouts for his family. But when a sudden illness and an unexpected reunion threaten the dutiful housewife's potential inheritance, she must hatch a desperate plan.
Starring: Nadezhda Markina, Andrey Smirnov, Aleksey Rozin, Elena Lyadova, Evgeniya KonushkinaForeign | 100% |
Drama | 96% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Russian: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1
Russian: LPCM 2.0
Not "English" as reported by BDInfo
English
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (locked)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 5.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
It seems that a person only appears in his true colors, when someone treads on his toes. — Andrey ZvyagintsevElena is the third film by Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, who is best known for his striking 2003 debut, The Return (not yet available on Blu-ray), and his Oscar-nominated fourth feature from 2014, Leviathan. The film began as part of an ambitious project by a British producer to assemble four directors, each of whom would make a different film on the subject of apocalypse. The project itself went nowhere, but Zvyagintsev and co-writer Oleg Negin devised a story that appealed to both of them. At first glance, Elena doesn't appear "apocalyptic" in any obvious sense of the word. It's an intimate drama that plays out over a few weeks with a handful of characters, minimal dialogue, no special effects and a decidedly realistic, even banal, setting. Although Zvyagintsev has called the film "a fast, intense ride", that is only true in the film's later portion. For the first hour, Elena proceeds at a stately, deliberate pace requiring—no, insisting—that viewers pay strict attention and focus on the tiniest details. Indeed, the director notes with amusement, in the interview included on this disc, that he has heard many complaints about the film's opening shot, which lasts just over a minute, during which nothing seems to be happening. In fact, things are happening, but most importantly the film is setting the rules for what's to follow. It is telling the audience that this is a story where the world may change in an instant as brief, or a motion as small, as the flutter of a bird's wings.
Elena was shot on film by Mikhail Krichman, who has been the cinematographer on all of Zvyagintsev's films. Post-production was completed at 2K on a digital intermediate, from which Zeitgeist's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was presumably sourced by a direct digital path. The Blu-ray image is superb, with clarity, sharpness and detail that could easily be mistaken for first-rate digital photography. I spotted only one instance of aliasing (on the grille work of a parked car) as a telltale sign of the limitations of 2K processing. Otherwise, the image aptly serves the film's technique of holding shots for long intervals while the viewer is invited to study every element in the frame. The color palette for Vladimir's apartment is dominated by deep browns and cool blues; it's a controlled environment where everything has been designed and arranged. The apartment of Sergei's family, by contrast, is a hodgepodge of colors, none of them bright or fresh; it's a random jumble, much like the yard where Elena catches the train to visit her family. The church that Elena visits to light a candle is ornate and richly appointed, and several other key locations that it is better for the reader not to know about in advance have distinctive color schemes appropriate to their functions. Zeitgeist has used all of a BD-50 for the film and extras, yielding an average bitrate for the film of 32.05 Mbps. Given the number of static shots in the film, Elena could probably manage with less, but in any case, the compression has been carefully done, and no artifacts appeared.
Elena's 5.1 soundtrack has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, and it is spare but impressive. The mix uses silence just as effectively as sound, and the silence may be broken by an event off-camera, as happens during the opening shot when a crow caws to the left and rear before flapping into view. Trains and autos pass to left and right, and TVs are a constant presence, whether on- or off-camera, usually playing game shows or what sounds like a Russian version of reality TV. A visit to Vladimir's fitness club provides the sounds of workout machines and a swimming pool. Near the end, a complex outdoor scene involving multiple extras has elaborate sound editing that cannot be described without spoilers. I do not speak Russian, but I presume the dialogue is clearly rendered. A key element to the soundtrack is the urgent underscore by Philip Glass, which, in a wise decision, has been used to intensify only a few key scenes, so that it retains its impact. (Glass's scores are less effective when overused.)
Zeitgeist's Blu-ray of Elena includes the extras contained on the Region B-locked disc released by New Wave in February 2013 and adds several new ones. The new extras are marked with an asterisk below.
Zvyagintsev has spoken of the need to re-examine "the myth insisting that evil will be punished without fail". He urges instead that we consider the modern world as one "where evil can turn up in your house with the everyday banality of a plumber". While it may be tempting to view such cynicism as a unique product of post-Soviet Russia, the sheer ordinariness of the conflicts in Elena undercut such an easy interpretation. One does not need to go to Moscow to find elderly men who remarry when their children are grown and find their property subject to a tug of war between relations, with the attendant drama and emotion. Elena may be an extreme case, but the conflicts are typical. Evil may be just a matter of degree. Highly recommended.
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