Nadezhda Markina gives a marvelously understated performance in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s ELENA
ELENA (Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
May 16-29
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
www.zeitgeistfilms.com
Winner of a Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Elena is a poignant character study and family drama set in Vladimir Putin’s post-Communist Russia. Nadezhda Markina gives a marvelously understated performance as Elena, a former nurse now married to her second husband, the successful and very direct Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov). Elena’s son from her first marriage, the unemployed Sergey (Alexey Rozin), is in need of money to support his wife, Tatyana (Evgenia Konushkina) and send his son, Sasha (Igor Ogurtsov), to university, but Vladimir is reconsidering helping them out, believing that it’s about time that Sergey got a job and took care of things himself. Vladimir’s hesitation extremely disappoints Elena, especially when Vladimir continues to support his daughter, Katerina (Elena Lyadova), a free spirit who barely acknowledges his existence. After Vladimir suffers a heart attack, Elena fears for her future and that of her family, suddenly facing some hard questions. Zvyagintsev has followed up the critical smash successes The Return and The Banishment with another superbly told tale that makes expert use of the tools of his trade, from the strong, assured script, which he cowrote with Oleg Negin, and the gorgeous cinematography by Mikhail Krichman to the solid acting and the haunting music. Elena is this generation’s Jeanne Dielman, a deliberate, methodical woman who finds herself caught up in a complex situation with no easy way out. The slow pace of the film, which is filled with lingering shots and Philip Glass’s modern-noir score (from 1995’s Symphony No. 3), moves intoxicatingly to the beat of Elena’s heart. Zvyagintsev, who was just celebrated at BAM with a three-day “Next Director” retrospective, will be at Film Forum for a discussion following the 8:00 screening on May 16.
If you’ve never seen this remarkable cinematic achievement, prepare to be overwhelmed by Jean Renoir’s antiwar masterpiece, screening through May 24 at Film Forum in an all-new 35mm restored print in honor of the film’s seventy-fifth anniversary. The first foreign film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, Grand Illusion is set in a POW camp during WWI, where everyman pilot Lieutenant Maréchal (Jean Gabin), by-the-book Captain de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay), lovable Rosenthal (Marcel Dalio), and others are being held by the aristocratic Captain von Rauffenstein (an unforgettable Erich von Stroheim). Proclaimed “cinematic public enemy no. 1” by Joseph Goebbels, Grand Illusion takes on anti-Semitism, class structure, and religion in addition to war, a humanist film that is as relevant as ever seventy-five years after its initial release. Illustrator Paul Davis will be at Film Forum on May 15 following the 7:45 show to sign copies of his specially created poster celebrating the anniversary.
An exciting, fast-paced documentary set in the high-stakes art world, Andrew Shea’s Portrait of Wally is a gripping real-life legal thriller, complete with international intrigue, love and death, class warfare, lies and deception, and Nazis. In 1912, Austrian artist Egon Schiele painted a small portrait of his mistress, Walburga (“Wally”) Neuzil, in addition to a companion self-portrait. In 1939, the painting of Wally was stolen from art dealer Lea Bondi’s personal collection by Friedrich Welz, a Nazi who had also taken over Bondi’s gallery because she was Jewish. When the painting suddenly showed up in New York City in 1997 as part of the Museum of Modern Art’s “Egon Schiele: The Leopold Collection” exhibition, a furious, angry thirteen-year battle ensued over ownership of the work, involving Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau; MoMA director Glenn D. Lowry; Sharon Cohen Levin, chief of the Asset Forfeiture Unit of the U.S. Attorney’s Office; investigator Willi Korte of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project; Schiele-obsessed art collector Rudolf Leopold; and the Bondi family. Other major museums sided with MoMA in a concerted effort to prevent the government from returning the painting to the Bondis, claiming that it would seriously damage the ability of art institutions to bring works on loan for exhibition in the United States; interestingly, Lowry and MoMA chairman Ronald S. Lauder, who is also the head of the Commission for Art Recovery and displays many of Schiele’s paintings and drawings at his Neue Galerie in New York City, opted not to speak with Shea, but the filmmaker did meet with Morgenthau, Levin, André Bondi, New York Times reporter Judith Dobrzynski, 60 Minutes journalist Morley Safer, Galerie St. Etienne owner and Schiele expert Jane Kallir, and others who share fascinating details about the personal and professional history of Schiele and the painting as well as the inner workings of the art world. Mixing archival footage with new interviews, Shea and his wife, editor Melissa Shea, tell a compelling tale of global importance filled with powerful emotion that, in many ways, evokes the feeling one gets when looking closely at a master work of art. But Portrait of Wally is about a lot more than just art; it is also about memory, about family, about responsibility, and about justice.