Philip Glass - Elena 2011 SoundTrack // Alexander Richter MusicBlog

Elena’s opening embodies a certain stylization of stillness that one tends to associate with Russian cinema—an aesthetic that favors an amplification of small ambient sounds at the expense of more chaotic, realistic everyday noise, which imbues everyday moments with implications of looming disruption, buried resentment, and longing. Director Andrei Zvyagintsev is able to get most of the necessary exposition out of the way in the first five evocative minutes. A crow lands on the barren tree outside of an expensive and expansive residence. A middle-aged woman (the unforgettably wonderful Nadezhda Markina) awakes to the sound of an alarm clock. Tellingly, she’s sleeping on a couch. She takes a few deep breaths, resigns herself to the approaching day in a fashion that’s familiar to the deeply unhappy, and begins to comb her hair. She starts the breakfast tea and coffee and, more tellingly, proceeds to a bedroom to nudge an older man (Andrei Smirnov) awake who’s soon revealed through body language to be, at the least, a live-in lover. Eventually the couple sit down to breakfast and exchange a few pregnant not-quite-pleasantries that reveal that they’re somewhat recently married and that they mutually disapprove of how the other handles their adult child from prior relationships. We’re soon told that the woman is Elena and the gentleman is her husband, Vladmir, and it’s no accident that their association follows a series of rituals that are more characteristic of servant/master...