The film opens with a lovely spilt-focus shot of the exterior of an apartment building. A branch with a bird populates the foreground while large living room windows are in the distance. It is early morning and a middle-aged woman stirs in her bed before rising to begin her morning routine. This is Elena. Every morning she awakes, opens the curtains, and cooks breakfast for her husband, Vladimir, who sleeps in a separate bed. Vladimir is a bit older than his wife. They met about ten years previously when he was a patient at a hospital and she was a nurse.
Elena is a woman of humble means while Vladimir is a man of wealth. They live in a spacious apartment or condo in a well-to-do neighborhood. Both have children from their previous marriages. Vladimir has a daughter named Katya with whom he is estranged. Elena's son Sergei lives on the other side of the tracks with his wife and family in a cramped apartment in a large tenement. They have two children, a toddler and a high school senior named Sasha, with a third on the way.
Upon graduation, Sasha is either going to be drafted into military service or go to university. Sergei and family prefer the latter option but the boy is a less than stellar student so gaining admission is going to require that some money exchange hands – money they don't have. Sergei leans on his mother to convince Vladimir to help out and Elena does so. At breakfast one day Elena asks him to finally decide whether or not he will donate the money to Sasha's illicit college fund. Vladimir says that he'll give a yes or no in a week. During the interim, he suffers a heart attack and is hospitalized. When finally back at home, Elena presses him again about the matter and he declines, reiterating what he said before, namely, that Sergei is a man and he should be the one supporting his family.
I will avoid giving everything away but will say that Zvyagintsev does not make this a heart-warming drama where both sides reconcile and everyone lives happily ever after.
What I read about the film emphasized the influence of Alfred Hitchcock, which is certainly present, but I suspect Russian audiences will relate more to the social commentary. My knowledge of contemporary Russia is very limited but I recently listened to a wonderful BBC documentary series called Russia: The Wild East and I can't help but feel that Elena and her family represent muzjiks or peasants. While I don't doubt the movie is commenting upon the Russia of today, I just can't help but think of how Russian peasants got the shaft many a time in the 20th century. The famine of the early 1920s and the effects of collectivization in the 1930s come to mind.
Zvyagintsev encourages a wider interpretation of the story beyond a suspenseful tale with various techniques. For starters, we never learn where movie takes place. The name of the city is never mentioned. Furthermore, Elena and Vladimir as well as their families are studies in contrast. As the opening of the film shows us, Elena sleeps in a separate and smaller bed than Vladimir. She wakes him up and cooks his breakfast – more like a maid than a spouse.
As I mentioned previously, Vladimir and his daughter, Katya, are estranged but she is not totally absent here as she visits him in the hospital after his heart attack. We meet an educated, urban woman who is something of a hedonist that indulges in food, sex, and drugs - the latter on weekends only, however. Beyond some verbal sparring with her father, Katya tries to remain aloof from her familial obligations. Elena, on the other hand, is intimately involved with Sergei and his family. They are poor so she helps them financially but giving them a portion of her pension each time she receives a payment. Katya has no interest in becoming a mother while Sergei seems to continue having children he can barely afford.
I suppose there are a myriad of ways of looking at the dichotomy of Vladimir and Elena with urban vs. rural, traditional vs. modern, and rich vs. poor being the obvious ones. Taking into account the families I think you can add old vs. young in as well. None of these are uniquely Russian so audiences needing subtitles should be able to find something in the characters to identify with or despise. Zvyagintsev sides with Elena, Sergei, and the rest of their family but perhaps only tentatively. Although they ostensibly prove victorious, Katya is not out of the picture and, since their victory was achieved through means that were ethically-challenged (to say the least), I got the impression that Zvyagintsev was leaving his audiences with a whole lot of ambivalence since neither side can lay claim to the moral high ground. Both Elena and Sergei are ugly in their own way.
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