Leviathan (2014)

Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev

Andrey Zvyagintsev is one of Russia’s most fierce and unique contemporary directors. Through acclaimed films like The Return (2003), The Banishment (2007) and Elena (2001), he has used a series of blissful audiovisual and thematic ingredients: the movement of a camera that embraces an imposing stage, the role of nature and religion inside human catastrophes, as well as the complex combinations of abstract, political and philosophical concepts. Leviathan (2014) is a stunning story with great symbolic, mythological and brutal thematic force. Zvyagintsev achieves a masterful result dealing with the human condition and its greatness, but also its decadence. The mystical, religious and spiritual worlds come together as one.

The story focuses on Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov), a mechanic who lives with his beautiful young wife, Lilya (Elena Lyadova), and with his teenage son from his first wife, Romka (Sergey Pokhodaev), in an old and dilapidated house that has belonged to Kolya’s family for generations. The property is located at the foot of a mountain, surrounded by a privileged view of the Barents Sea.

The vast place captures the attention of Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the mayor of the area. Vadim is an extremely corrupt and unscrupulous fellow that becomes obsessed with Kolya’s property. He issues a court order, forcing Kolya to sell him the house for a handful of rubles. Meanwhile, Dimitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), Kolya’s friend from his days in the army, is now a lawyer in touch with influential circles in Moscow. He travels and tries to defend Kolya against the arbitrariness that the state wants to inflict on him. Dmitriy is a handsome man and self-confessed atheist who tolerates Kolya’s angry outbursts.

Dmitriy’s arrival convulses, for better and for worse, the heat of things in the region. Vadim (protected by the law and his bodyguards) acts like an untouchable semi-god; only the head of the Orthodox Church stands before him in the area’s hierarchy, which is why the mayor listens to his spiritual advice and offers gifts to the church. He won’t be intimidated by Dmitriy and will use everything in his power in order to get him out of the way and strip Kolya of his property.

The setting of the fought-over location is a remarkable achievement, since it represents a remote, mystical and lonely place that invites the viewer to reflect. The desolation of the landscape is at times overwhelming, and there’s also one special symbol that accompanies the beautiful photographic images: the enormous skeleton of an imposing oceanic animal, which we see repeatedly, as well as remains of stranded old ships.

Leviathan is a “colossal monster”, as read in both Genesis and the Old Testament Book of Job. “Discouragement spreads before him,” Job pointed out; “He is king over all the proud”. In the book of the same name written by Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan is a monster created by man in the form of a state, composed of the secular and the spiritual. The monster holds an absolute power, exercised severely to keep men from killing each other.

Zvyagintsev’s film comprises these elements. His primary interest is to examine human relationships and the behavior of men under pressure. Throughout the story, Kolya is confronted with an oppressive, cold, and despotic system. It happens that from this particular struggle, a series of misfortunes begin to crush his relationships with family and friends. Not only the monster of state power, the loved ones are also those who end up hurting and betraying him.

Zvyagintsev transports the viewer through the cells of different scenarios: the interior of the protagonist’s house, in which the concepts of the domestic and the familiar are fused with claustrophobia, the endless landscapes that constantly refer to an insignificance of the human in front of nature; the threatening sea from which some kind of beast seems about to emerge; the administration offices, with that aftertaste of Kafka’s The Trial; then the obscure chambers of the orthodox priest, in which the earthly and the divine are condensed in the form of luxury. Each landscape, natural or human, determines a type of scene and seems to condition its characters, forcing them to develop a specific behavior. Each individuality is pushed by the weight of the social structure and the collective history.

In Franz Kafka’s words: “One must lie low, no matter how much it went against the grain, and try to understand that this great organization remained, so to speak, in a state of delicate balance, and that if someone took it upon himself to alter the dispositions of things around him, he ran the risk of losing his footing and falling to destruction, while the organization would simply right itself by some compensating reaction in another part of its machinery – since everything interlocked – and remain unchanged, unless, indeed, which was very probable, it became still more rigid, more vigilant, severer, and more ruthless.”

by Octavio Carbajal González