The last movie we saw at the Wisconsin Film Festival was the very Russian film Elena. How Russian? In the first scene, the sun rises behind the curtained windows of an upscale house, as viewed through the limbs of a leafless tree. The sun hasn’t risen at the beginning of the scene, in which the house and the tree are cloaked in pre-dawn gloom, but it’s shining through the windows by the time the scene ends, about five minutes later. Or it could have been fifteen minutes later. It felt like fifteen.

Anyway, I didn’t realize at first that we were witnessing the sunrise. That only became apparent when the orange-yellow glow of the rising sun began to backlight the house, several minutes into the scene. The gathering light gradually made me aware that there was a large, grayish bird with a red crest sitting silently in the branches of the tree. Then, as the first rays of sunshine burst through the windows of the house, another bird joined the first, cawing like a crow. Crows caw throughout the movie, typically in the company of the movie’s principal characters, Elena and Vladimir. At the end of the movie, as the camera lingers on the same shot of the house that opened the film and there is no more Vladimir, only one crow is sitting in the tree outside the house. That’s how Russian this movie is.

Elena has been married to Vladimir for about two years. He is very rich. She, apparently, was not until she married Vladimir. Her grandson, Sasha, will be drafted into the army unless she can convince Vladimir to hand over enough money to bribe a college official or two and get Sasha into college. Vladimir loves Elena, but he doesn’t like her son’s family much, and won’t give Elena the money.

Here’s a hot tip for you: When your Russian wife asks you for a chunk of money, give it to her, especially if you put her in charge of doling out your medicine. Piss her off, and you’re going to end up in the darkly-lit, brooding scenes of a Russian movie while a quartet of cellos play the same line of somber music over and over.