Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov channels Mother Russia. Old women figure as revered avatars of mythical power in his films. In “Mother and Son” a man cradles a frail elderly woman for walks around a fabulist landscape where far-off trains pass. Anamorphic distortions lend a dream-like disorientation. Shot in Chechnya, “Alexandra” centers on an old woman in better health who travels by a military train to visit her grandson. She arrives at his base in an unspecified war zone. If this seems against regulations, your intuition is leading into the film’s allegory. Retired Russian opera star Galina Vishnevskaya plays the title character. Unmindful of mine fields, she tours a nearby town, partly in ruins, where she befriends other old women. Their sons and grandsons are likely combatants with the Russian occupiers. Sokurov is entranced by Vishnevskaya, as evident in “Elegy of Life: Rostropovich. Vishnevskaya,” his 2006 documentary playing concurrently at the Gene Siskel Film Center. Vishnevskaya gets more screen time than her cellist-composer husband Mstislav Rostropovich, and Sokurov closes this elegy—in eight other films he uses “elegy” in the titles—transfixed with her steady haunting stare. (In a voiceover, Sokurov regrets not talking to an old woman he films on the steps of a concert hall.) Alexandra moves through a mostly decolorized military zone. Like a deity sent to observe the folly of man-made war, she’s the mother of all embeds. 92m. (Bill Stamets)
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