Alexandra.

"Alexander Sokurov's Alexandra - a film of startling originality and beauty - feels like a communiqué from another time, another place, anywhere but here," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times. "Mr Sokurov, a Russian director best known in America for Russian Ark (2002), makes films so far removed from the usual commercial blather that it sometimes seems as if he's working in a different medium. His work is serious, intense, at times opaque and so feverishly personal that it also feels as if you're being invited into his head, not just another reality."

Updated through 3/30.

"In her recent history of Russian war films, scholar Denise Youngblood notes that the half-dozen movies treating the Chechen conflict fall into two categories," notes J Hoberman in the Voice. "There are the internationalist films like Sergei Bodrov's Prisoner of the Caucasus, which romanticize the conflict, casting the Chechens as oriental Others, and there are chauvinist films like Aleksei Balabanov's War, which sound a warning against encroaching barbarism. Alexandra is neither. The conflict is an existential condition; Sokurov's subject, in his own words, is 'the eternal life of Russia... There is not a single word that could not have been sounded forty years ago.'"

"Set in a Russian army encampment in Chechnya, the film consists entirely of a grandmother's brief visit to see her grandson, an army captain, and her walks when he is away," writes Nicolas Rapold in the New York Sun. "o guns or bombs go off - we simply wander with the babushka's whims, yet the movie is raptly engaging."

"Alexandra could be a cynic's militarized revision of Peter Pan," suggests Benjamin H Sutton in the L Magazine. "Sokurov's string of historical dramas (culminating in the single-take history lesson-via-museum tour Russian Ark) gives way to a universal tale of squandered youth."

At New York's Film Forum through April 8.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes and New York.

Updates, 3/27: "This movie, so simple on its surface and so hard to figure out, is a pretty tough point of entry to Sokurov's work, though it's not like his other narrative features (The Sun, Father and Son, Mother and Son, Moloch, etc) are such easy assignments either." Salon's Andrew O'Hehir presents "the Cliff notes as I see them."

"Despite the narrative's move from Alexandra's drifting tour of the military occupation of Chechnya to more specific, less impressionistic interaction with Denis about his life and state of mind, and a sequence where Alexandra befriends an elderly Chechen woman that is emblematic of how vague Sokurov is sketching this section of the film, Alexandra somehow loses its emotional might," writes Daniel Kasman in the Auteurs' Notebook. "The film had so beautifully evoked this tenor of decamped emotional ties, of a people cared for forever traveling away from home, by conflating the grandmother's searching familial love with the isolated, forlorn faces of the soldiers, but the moment the film tries to explore its characters and what they think and feel, it becomes lost in a gently, caringly muddled blur."

Update, 3/28: "[I]n spite of Sokurov's usual formal mastery - dispensed this time in audience-friendly short takes rather than punishingly long ones - the gist of Alexandra can be processed in pretty short order," writes Noel Murray at the AV Club. "Which would be fine, if Sokurov weren't so clumsy about delivering the message."

Update, 3/30: "Sokurov's films seem to be getting more and more accessible (his video work is another matter), but scratch the surface and they're actually quite bizarre," writes Michael Sicinski.

Posted by dwhudson at March 26, 2008 11:41 AM