Aleksandr Zeldovich, who is sixty-two this year, is known both for taking his time and for capturing the moment. His films appear once a decade and often adapt classic texts. His Moscow (2000) imagined Anton Chekhov's sisters finally making it to the (now post-Soviet) metropolis and confronting its—and their own—emptiness, while The Target (2011) set the plot of Lev Tolstoi's Anna Karenina (1878) in a sci-fi future where desires are fulfilled both mystically and destructively. Medea, Zeldovich's fourth film, is his first writing effort (both Moscow and The Target were written by Vladimir Sorokin) and it sets one of the western world's most interpreted myths between a vaguely contemporary Russia and a timeless Israel.

Over landscapes gorgeously shot by cinematographer Aleksandr Il΄khovskii, a narrator tells of her love for a rich and married businessman, Aleksei, with whom she has two children. When Aleksei suddenly decides to leave his wife, he suggests they start over together in Israel. The narrator's brother, an FSB officer, objects: he threatens her, but as she is Medea, things end poorly for the brother.

The first-person narration soon resolves into a confession: we watch the nameless heroine (Tinatin Dalakishvili in a mesmerizing performance) profess her sins from inside a silent and apparently empty confessional in Israel. She and Aleksei (Evgenii Tsyganov) initially create some measure of happiness in their new home. But when he finds out what happened to her brother, they separate. She becomes obsessed with aging, with stopping time (a power that, it is hinted, she might indeed possess), and she spends the remainder of the film having sex with strangers in an attempt to fill the void left by Aleksei. Each time she reaches orgasm, she dies a biological death. Her lovers shake her naked body and she revives.

The film's mystical surrealism, epic scale, and technical mastery made it the talk of the Kinotavr film festival—the “Russian Cannes” that takes over Sochi for a week every September. The performances, cinematography, and shooting locations create an exquisitely saturated aesthetic, brilliantly complemented by the discordant and haunting original score (written by Aleksei Retinskii, performed by Theodor Kourentzsis's MusicAeterna orchestra). Few directors can marshal the talent—or funds—to make a film at this level of artistry. Many viewers also saw in it an affecting portrayal of today's world. Vasilii Stepanov writes in Séance that Zeldovich's semi-mythological and semi-contemporary Israel expresses a very of-the-moment desire for “an ideal, utopian place of separation,” a desire that inevitably fails for both hero and heroine.Footnote ¹

Other viewers saw something less timely—a retrograde treatment of gender. Zinaida Prochenko writes in Afisha that Zeldovich is concerned with “the past, or in his mind, the eternal. That eternal is composed of [the oligarch] Sergei Adoniev's capitalfemale nudity and death.”Footnote ² The film certainly invites such a critique, and Zeldovich's own statements add fuel to the flames: “It's not that she's a woman,” he said of his protagonist in one interview, “She is the incarnation of passion, she's a vector, she's an intention.”Footnote ³ In another interview, he defends the film as “the most feminist film that you could ever imagine, a hosannah to woman. Medea is very woman. On the other hand, she's not fully a person.”Footnote ⁴ These last sentences (“Medea—ochen΄ zhenshchina. S drugoi storony ona ne sovsem chelovek”) simultaneously capture both Zeldovich's intentions and the justifiable critique.

Responses to the film generally split into two camps: one sees something eternal and contemporary in Medea and the other finds Zeldovich's treatment of gender painfully out of step with the times. But I would suggest that Zeldovich's misogyny is quintessentially contemporary: it is a sickness of our moment, a condition that seems to afflict especially the affluent and culturally influential. Near the end of the film, Zeldovich has his protagonist overpay a gifted watchmaker to make her luxury timepiece move counterclockwise. It's a perfect metaphor for the condition that Zeldovich and his film instantiate, in which unfettered private capital pays virtuosic artists and talented technicians vast sums in order to—beautifully, compellingly, with appeals to eternal truths—make the world spin backwards.