Leviathan (2014)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on May 31, 2015 @ tonymacklin.net.

Leviathan is one of those rare films where much of the meaning lurks beneath the surface.

How can a bleak film be dazzling? It can, when you think about it. Leviathan is bleakly dazzling.

Leviathan is more of a critics' film than a movie for general audiences. It received a phenomenal 99% fresh rating from reviewers on Rotten Tomatoes. Only one nyet-sayer.

The Russian-language Leviathan received an Oscar nomination as Best Foreign Language Film of 2014.

Cineastes seem to find Leviathan challenging and rewarding. But I wouldn't recommend it to the average viewer, who probably would find it listless and not worth his time. Leviathan is far from generic entertainment.

Most viewers will recognize that it's an allegory about contemporary, post-Soviet Russia. But the creativity is shrouded by layers of off-putting gloom and density.

Leviathan takes place in a coastal fishing village in northwest Russia on the Barents Sea. The film opens at night with images of surf crashing against rocky shore. They're accompanied by the evocative music of Philip Glass that establishes a haunting mood. The music is more subtle than the usual musical score these days. The cinematography by Mikhail Krichman adds to the somber mood.

A feeling of dread permeates the film. We don't know how events will happen, so we're kept disquieted and unsettled. So are the characters.

In the opening shots we see decayed husks of ships in the darkness - rotted, wooden skeletons. Their time is long gone. They're symbolic of the past.

In the nighttime darkness, Kolya (Alexey Serebryakov) leaves his ramshackle but comfortable home. We hear sounds without music - a door of a house closing, beeps as a car door is unlocked, and the noise of a car engine. He drives away in the darkness. It's darkness at night, not yet Darkness at Noon.

Kolya drives to a train station where he meets Dmitri, whom he calls Dima (Vladimir Vdovitchenkov), and embraces him after he gets off the train from Moscow.

It turns out that they served in the army together, and Dmitri is a lawyer who has come to help his friend, whose property is being seized by the local mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov), who has plans to transform the land into a money-making development. Capitalists, eat your heart out.

Kolya and Dima think that ultimately they have law on their side, but they don't. At the Town Council, they face a verbose, toneless rejection.

The system is stagnant, the law enforcement is corrupt - from traffic cops to the mayor and above. The whole society is rigged and closed.

The common people feel their entrapment. The characters drink vodka - a lot of vodka - and smoke cigarettes - a lot of cigarettes - to try to dull their reality. Leviathan is awash in vodka and futility. Vodka is potent, but futility is terminal.

Kolya lives with his son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev) and his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova). The son resents Lilya, and the father is obsessed with trying to retain his property. "I built this place with my own hands," he cries. The family is vulnerable as the system overwhelms them.

Because of the alienation she feels, Lilya is drawn to Dima, which results in a fateful entanglement. At a picnic, they are caught together, and relationships are torn apart.

Lilya begins to get up before daybreak and travels in a van with silent women to a thankless job at a drab fish processing company. Dima still tries to deal with the mayor, but he faces severe opposition.

As the damaged characters try to endure, their lives face punishing travail. They are citizens of a soulless society.

The screenplay of Leviathan by director Andrey Zvyagintsev and co-writer Oleg Negin has provocative levels. It is full of meaningful details. Scene after scene is connected. In one, the traffic cop Ivan is sitting in Kolya's garage as Kolya works on his car. Ivan is doing a crossword puzzle. The answer to one clue is a nine letter word: E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.

This cleverly relates to a prior set-up. Previously Lilya tells stepson Roma to wash himself. "Go on. Don't be an ape," she says. He snaps back, "You're the ape."

Later she tells Kolya, "He's your son. Up to you whether a man or ape."

E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N in Russia.

Often a brief sequence is more relevant than it may seem on the surface. Dima sees a young girl in the aisle of a train, which crucially seems to remind him of his own daughter.

Zvyagintsev and Negin create a film that has provocative levels. Many artistic directors are masters of duality, and Zvyagintsev uses it to great advantage.

Leviathan is full of dualities: Kolya had two wives; there are two traffic cops; there are two female friends - Lilya and Angela; there are two children - each family has a son; there are two Ivans; Vadim the mayor is accompanied by his muscleman; there are two men and two women in the mayor's office.

There are two tilted remains of boats; Lilya takes two walks by the water; the train comes and another goes; after trauma, Kolya buys two bottles of Vodka; there are two pigs in a trough; there are two churches - one old and gone; there are two priests - the local, human one and the duplicitous bishop; Dima orders the borscht he and Lilya had in the past for them to have again; Lilya and Dima look at their bruised visages in a mirror; two tractors are on Kolya's land; two cars are driven by cops in the rain. And the ultimate duality - a living sea creature in the sea in the distance, and the bleached skeleton of a sea creature on the shore.

One of Zvyagintsev's most effective techniques is to resolve things but not completely clarify them. Often we don't see events actually take place. What exactly happened to Kolya's first wife? What exactly happens to his second? What is the book in the outhouse that causes such riotous laughter? What exactly happens on the picnic? What is the evidence against the mayor?

Zvyagintsev keeps us questioning, because he keeps the information inchoate. Knowledge is piecemeal, second-hand, incomplete.

Leviathan is the kind of movie that shows frontal nudity without showing the breasts.

Leviathan reveals a Russian society that is in dismal decline. Zvyagintsev sees it in a political vice. The state and the church have abandoned the people and have them in a stranglehold.

Zvyagintsev takes literal potshots at the old leaders, when at a picnic the drunken men use pictures of Lenin, Brezhnev, Gorbachev, et al. for target practice. "It's too early for the current ones," a picnicker says.

Zvyagintsev uses other recognizable political figures. After a meeting with Dmitri, Vadim the mayor stands with a picture of Putin on the wall behind him. It's a telling juxtaposition. And, in a sly allusion, an image of Pussy Riot appears on the television set as Roma starts to leave the house.

Religion and its expression is a major theme in Leviathan. After he experiences the traumatic experience, Kolya meets his local priest, Father Vasily, who is humane. Father Vasily tells him about Job and quotes scripture about Leviathan, "Can you pull in leviathan with a fishhook?" He tells him how God let Job survive and then prosper. Will Kolya be able to find solace?

Father Vasily contrasts with the Orthodox bishop (Valery Grishko), who lives a life of fine meals, gaudy trappings, and material influence. Before his congregation, the bishop pontificates, "Truth is God's legacy." He continues, "True values are being replaced by false ones." He should know. State and Church are colluding.

In Leviathan modern power-grabbing religious and political institutions are unlikely to raise people out of their malaise.

After the mass, we see a line of cars in the distance all going in one direction. It contrasts with a map Kolya previously showed Dima when the area was an active waterway.

Leviathan ends with the image of a red object bobbing in the roiling surf before the rocky shore. Is it an oil drum, or an empty container, or some surviving jetsam?

Either way, it's no leviathan. The leviathan is now a beached, white skeleton.

Leviathan has changed.

In one of the most powerful scenes in the movie, a house is destroyed by a monstrous machine. It's like a beast with claws smashes the home.

There is existence after the devastation.

In Leviathan, Andrey Zvyagintsev asks, what is it?

And what could it be?