Perplexity is one of the pleasures of art. Who wants culture to be pap on a plate? (For Hollywood’s affirmative answer, in the late, late silly season, see below). Watching a film by Aleksandr Sokurov, maker of Mother and Son and Russian Ark, is like searching for meat in an opaque soup. Where exactly is it? Is it there at all? Will it elude us the more we chase it?

The bewitching Alexandra is the Russian director’s tale – more tone-poem – of a patrician old lady visiting her officer grandson on an army base near the Chechen front. Not much plot, masses of mood. The eerie haze of the visuals, the half-babble of music and the toneless, teasing dialogue dance attendance on the strangest ghost of all: Galina Vishnevskaya, opera diva and Mstislav Rostropovich’s widow, as granny.