I am drawn to these synchronicities, to the nexuses that occur in my own experience, and that repeat endlessly in art. Besides the contrast of the young woman's view of men and war, as compared the elderly woman's view of men and war, these two pieces tell the same story. Men do what men seem damned, or created, to do. Women watch and wonder. Indeed writer and director Aleksandr Sokurov (Russian Ark) seems to have created a female alter-ego to plumb the female point of view.
In one scene Aleksandra, on an independent and unsanctioned excursion into a Chechen market, befriends an elderly Chechen woman. The Chechen woman, recognizing that Alexandra, tired in body and spirit, cannot sleep amidst the hurly burly of the military base, offers to take her to her apartment for tea. In this simple moment of hospitality the two women, barely acquainted for an hour, care for one another as fast friends. Aleksandra says that they are like sisters. And how can that be while these men, their sons and husbands, wage war. They have no answer to this question. But there is little doubt that that is a question writer and director Sokurov asks.
He also wonders why women love these men. We know why men love women. Even at 81 Aleksandra becomes a magnet for the men's attention. They serve her, carry her, guide her, feed her. In return she gently chides them, touches them, treats them well, and appeals to their decency. As she walks through the camp, navigating amongst armoured personnel carriers, troop transports, and tanks, she reminds them, not to be too trite about it, of their humanity. The tenderness she elicits reaches a zenith when she returns from her excursion to the market. First the young troops guide her to a table for the meal she missed. They set the table elegantly, with a bouquet of flowers. Then, as she returns to the room she is sharing with Denis, he exclaims of his concern at her absence and, after their most heated exchange about his need to marry, and to settle down, Aleksandra confesses to him that she's no good without a man. Despite having earlier declared that her husband was hard, and hard to live with, and describing how free she feels without him, in the presence of her grandson she reveals an ache that surprises us. Then, in a remarkable scene, as Denis hugs her, she tells him, "You smell nice. You smell like a man." She touches his chest, almost as a lover, and then she tells him he should go and wash. The grandson replies by saying, not until I have braided your hair (which he has, earlier in the scene, unbraided, despite her tired protestations). He gently and deftly does it as she says that he used to do this for her as a child.
Both Aleksandra and Lavinia (full review of the book later, when I'm finished it) love men, and pay attention to the details that signify nurture and care: feet, hair, shivering, illness. But this is not a doting, overbearing presence. These women accept "the ways of men". Lavinia, while eating breakfast with her new husband Aeneas, marvels how those hands, those eyes, can be so tender in the home, but on the battlefield they are fierce and ruthless - unknowable and wild.
How great is this divide? Is it not within a man himself? How can we house these opposites? How do we braid a grandmother's hair, and hours later head out to shoot to kill our own kind? The answer, I suppose, rattles itself out, rasps from the mouth of some Leviathan, "This is the human condition". I admit it. I feel it in myself. In my own rage and tirades. But I feel so small when I'm done.
I recall now a paired set of scenes from the movie. In the elderly woman's apartment there are stacks of books tied together in rows on the floor. Later, as Denis unbraids Aleksandra's hair, she asks him what he's reading. "What?" he says.
She asks it again, "What are you reading now?"
"Nothing," he says.
Ride to Harry & Susan Wiens (a bit of a circuitous route of 26 ks)
Temp 17'C Wind SSE 12 ks (my avg speed: 35 k/h)
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