The Woman with the 5 Elephants

The Woman With The 5 Elephants isn't flawless; as articulate and fascinating as Geier could be, she was also dry at times. But Jendreyko cleverly parcels out her personal history, and he isn't afraid to break up the talkiness with long silences and luminous images.

The film is most effective when Geier, accompanied by a granddaughter, goes to Ukraine to speak at a school.

Watching Svetlana Geierat work, parsing the wild complexities of language as she converts Russian into German, the doc becomes a meditation on enforcing order in a world that refuses to accept it.

Geier, who died in 2010, speaks on all subjects - from her son's mortal injury to the nature of her various collaborations - with the contemplative, courtly intelligence of her favorite novels.

It's an interesting story, well told, though Mr. Jendreyko overworks some documentary fallbacks: gnarled fingers, the view from a moving train.

Gingerly pieced together, The Woman with the 5 Elephants has a delicacy and indirectness that's alluring and provocative at the same time.

Alas, this learned woman of letters - her expertise became the work of Dostoyevsky, whose major novels Geier nicknames "the five elephants" - is ill served by a trudging approach and dry-as-dust, procedural style.