2015 Top Ten List #5 Leviathan (Leviafan)

LEVIATHAN (Leviafan)          A-            
Russia  (140 mi)  2014  ‘Scope  d:  Andrei Zvyagintsev 

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? 

     or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through with a thorn? 

     Will he make many supplications unto thee? will he speak soft words unto thee?

Will he make a covenant with thee? wilt thou take him for a servant for ever? 

     Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?

Shall the companions make a banquet of him? shall they part him among the merchants? 

     Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons? or his head with fish spears?

Lay thine hand upon him, remember the battle, do no more. 

     Behold, the hope of him is in vain: shall not one be cast down even at the sight of him?

None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

—Job 41:1 – 10 

The first Russian film to win a Golden Globe award for Best Foreign Film (Leviathan by Andrey Zvyagintsev Takes Golden Globe and FIPRESCI Prize) since Sergei Bondarchuk’s WAR AND PEACE in 1969, which went on to win an Academy Award in the same category, while Nikita Mikhalkov’s BURNT BY THE SUN (1994) was the last Russian film to win an Academy Award.  Continuing in a series of bold and audacious Russian films that attempt to authenticate the abysmal conditions there, where the remnants of Stalinist brutality are everywhere to be seen, especially the way ordinary citizens continually pay the price for rampant government corruption that continues unabated.  Human lives are seen as disposable, murder and lies are condoned, so long as it protects the good standing of those currently in power.  While this is a particularly bleak worldview, it’s consistent with the equally distressing themes from other films coming out of Russia, where the most gruesome are Alexei Balabanov’s CARGO 200 (2007) and Sergei Loznitsa’s My Joy (Schastye moe) (2010), but also Aleksei Popogrebsky’s spare and beautiful 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #6 How I Ended This Summer, Boris Khlebnikov’s A Long and Happy Life (Dolgaya schastlivaya zhizn) (2013), both featuring the ruggedness of a barren location, and Yuri Bykov’s equally memorable The Major (Mayor)  (2013) and 2014 Top Ten List #9 The Fool (Durak), which prominently feature Dostoyevskian themes of dubious morality on display.  In each of these films, Russia is depicted much like a western in the days of the Wild West frontier where there was scant evidence of any civilized rule of law, where men had to stand up for themselves and only the strongest survived, usually through bloodshed.  LEVIATHAN, however, is not just a good movie in a similar vein, but it’s particularly well-made, where the acting is superb, the cinematography by Mikhail Krichman is simply astonishing, while the editing and sound design are exceptional, with music from Philip Glass’s opera Akhnaten, Philip Glass - Akhnaten HQ [Prelude; Refrain, Verse 1 ... YouTube (10:46), with that throbbing church organ blasting into the stratosphere at about the four and a half minute mark, where this particular attention to craftsmanship and meticulous detail is rare in cinema today, especially in an era of scarce funding.  One of the most important filmmakers working today, Zvyagintsev continues to make relevant films, where his starkly austere and emotionally spare first film THE RETURN (2003) won first prize at the Venice Film Festival and remains his most mystifyingly unique, while THE BANISHMENT (2007) and Elena (2011) are both reflective of his mastery over the medium.    

Partly inspired by the real-life incident of Marvin Heemeyer who in 2004 went on a violent rampage demolishing the town hall and the mayor’s property in the small town of Granby, Colorado, supposedly outraged over the outcome of a zoning dispute.  Loosely reshaping what happened to resemble an updated version of the Biblical story of Job, Zvyagintsev and co-writer Oleg Negin won the Best Screenplay Award at Cannes, where the story is set on Russia’s far northern coast above the Arctic circle on the Kola Peninsula near the Finnish border, in a small fishing village overlooking the Barents Sea.  With the breathtaking beauty of the opening cinematography, what’s immediately striking is the awesome force of nature, where civilization exists on the edge of a wild and uncontrollable sea, where waves are seen crashing against the rocks, and left behind on the shore is an age-old whale carcass that’s likely been there longer than anyone can remember, where its skeletal remains are a reminder of the mortality of human existence.  While the outdoor shooting took place in the town of Teriberka, the protagonist is an angry young Russian mechanic named Kolya (Alexei Serebriakov) whose family has been rooted to the same location for generations, living in a decaying and unpretentious wood frame house with windows overlooking the sea.  Kolya is as rugged as the land itself, a supremely individualistic man who drinks vodka relentlessly while swearing about the devious nature of the town mayor who for years has been trying to get his hands on their property.  A former soldier, Kolya is living with his beautiful wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) along with a distant and delinquent teenage son Roma (Sergei Pokhodaev) from an earlier marriage.  Their best friends and frequent visitors to their home are another married couple, Pacha (Aleksei Rozin), a police officer and fellow drinking buddy, and his outspoken wife Angela (Anna Ukolova).  What’s immediately apparent is the familiarity they have with one another, especially after several rounds of drinking, where no judgments are made as they seemingly embrace one other, flaws and all, like an extended part of the family.  But whatever stability exists comes to a crashing end as the scene shifts to the inside of a courtroom where a female judge speed reads his sentence in a thoroughly detached monotone, ultimately deciding to take his land away.  Kolya’s response is typical, to drown his sorrows in vodka, while later the equally drunk Mayor, Vadim (Roman Madyanov), in a much more celebratory mood pulls up to his house in a mammoth SUV along with several armed henchmen and screams between the curses, “You don’t have any rights, you never had any rights, and you will never have any rights!”

A new face arrives on the scene, an old army friend Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), Kolya’s former senior officer, now a hot-shot attorney in Moscow who has to acknowledge that on the face of it things don’t look good, that the cards are stacked in the Mayor’s favor, instituting a plan to dig up the dirt on the Mayor and confront him with publicizing his misdeeds, which may pressure him to change his mind.  While he has some initial success, as Vadim is flabbergasted that some slick Moscow attorney has such high level contacts to expose him, where in desperate straights, Vadim calls in his advisors to double check his options, but despite his pattern of cronyism, they remind him not to get so worked up, that things will work out, while also scheduling a personal appointment with the Orthodox priest, which turns out to be a most curious visit.  It’s important to understand that after the fall of the Soviet regime, the Russian Orthodox Church moved in and merged with the State, quickly reclaiming valuable real estate not only from factories and bureaucratic institutions but also from schools and hospitals, where a new church was being constructed seemingly on every street corner.  These construction projects were funded by entrepreneurs aligned with the government and more often than not involved bribing local officials, where overnight studying The Bible became a mandatory subject in schools while the head of the Church was wearing a forty thousand dollar wristwatch.  This sudden spurt of economic growth as a byproduct of rampant corruption is right out of Fassbinder’s LOLA (1981), where attempts at ethical reform and following the letter of the law are set aside for the sake of expedience.  Dmitri is so sure of himself, using the power of the law to empower a David over a Goliath, that he reaps the benefits of an overly grateful friend by sleeping with his wife, something that comes as a shock to the audience, but Kolya has lost all rational comprehension and has veered into delirium and near incapacity from excessive drinking, so he’s oblivious to what’s going on.  Dmitri, however, has already asked Lilya to return to Moscow with him, something on the face of it that would sound unthinkable.     

While the film is a critique of abuse of power, exposing how capitalism makes for strange bedfellows, while also drawing a larger picture of moral authority, actually bringing in the word of God in order to grasp the profound depths of the situation.  Job continually found himself at the mercy of the Lord, who tested his faith by a seeming limitless capacity to endure whatever obstacle God placed in his path.  But the parable of the entitled Leviathan taken from The Bible suggests there are powers greater than any man can endure, where death is but one of them.  The looming portrait of Putin hanging on the walls of the State offices is impossible to miss.  What elevates this particular film from others about corruption is how it connects the Russian Orthodox Church to the power of the Russian State, where their common interests are not for the benefit of people needing their services, but instead becomes an undaunted power grab, much like Henry VIII declaring himself the Supreme Head of the Church of England, where absolute power can do whatever it wants, steal, lie, kidnap, murder, inflict harm, declare war, or act irrationally and still continue to get away with it.  While Dmitri will soon discover he lacks this ultimate authority, he was nonetheless deluded enough to believe for a moment that he did through the power of law.  The fatalism of Roma and his friends, resigned to forever being outsiders, is the fate of the next generation knowing their future is doomed under the same unquestioned authority.  Lilya is perhaps the most anguished soul of them all, largely because she has the capacity to envision a better life, as Russia toyed with the idea of a democracy, but also watched that vision go down in defeat at the hands of absolute power, where she is similarly forced to accept a world with no future while capitulating to those who would take everything away from her in the process.  Kolya, on the other hand, has fended off every disaster with a sorrow rooted deeply within his Russian soul, but all that’s left is an instilled blindness, a brutal punishment with no chance of spiritual ascension, where drunken excess numbing the pain is the only way to endure the present, where there are simply no more thoughts about tomorrow.  In dramatic fashion, Zvyagintsev stages a drunken shooting party like The Last Supper, a vodka-fueled picnic where Kolya and his brethren of friends display spectacular humor at the Kafkaesque absurdity of their lives living in a Russian “shithole,” which is a mere fantasy or prelude of freedom, allowing their exaggerated, out of control behavior to grow to grotesque levels of excess, while the real events that matter will soon follow afterwards, where their lives are about to unravel, twisted into unrecognizable pieces of their former selves, beleaguered characters broken by an indomitable wind that blows over the land.

Elena

ELENA            B                    

Russia  (109 mi)  2011  ‘Scope  d:  Andrei Zvyagintsev

Somewhat slight compared to his earlier efforts, THE RETURN (2003) and THE BANISHMENT (2007), this is a subtle film that delves into the heart of the Russian conscience, where a wordless ten–minute opening into the empty expanse of a meticulously clean, thoroughly modern and luxurious yet seemingly cold and sterile Moscow condominium sets the scene for an unsparing examination of class consciousness.  Something of a generational morality tale where the future looks hopeless and overly bleak, this is a slow moving character exposé, almost a theater piece, where what’s most significant is the developing interior worlds of the characters, given a very novelesque structure of what turns out to be a modern day variation on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.  Centered around two main characters, a retired couple, Elena (Nadezhda Markina) and Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) live in separate bedrooms, each with their own television sets, where every morning she opens the curtains and wakes him up, where her role is carefully defined around the subordinate position of serving him, like a nursemaid, where it’s a portrait of two entirely separate worlds.  Extending further is the world of their children, each through previous marriages, where Vladimir’s mostly unseen and distant daughter, Katerina (Elena Lyadova), seems to live a hedonistic and carefree existence, accustomed to being taken care of all her life by the support of her father, while Elena’s aloof teenage son lives in a state of abject poverty with his perpetually idle father and nagging mother in a tenement housing project sitting adjacent to 3 nuclear power smokestacks.  The dismal picture of their blighted lives says it all, where Elena is constantly hounded for money, but Vladimir is unyielding when it comes to offering help, wondering why he should support a family whose own father won’t get off his unemployed ass and get a job to help support his own family?  When Elena tries to compare her son’s situation with his daughter, Vladimir refuses to hear any more on the subject, claiming even though his sarcastically hostile daughter is no great prize, he’s at least fulfilling his fatherly obligation.  What to do about their future is the subject of the film’s moral center, told through alternating characters, one living under the protection of supreme comfort, while the other can be seen traipsing through the graffiti-laden slums to visit her son and grandson. 

Having met late in life, their lives were already structured, as Elena was the nurse in the hospital several years ago when they met, and has continued serving that same role in marriage.  Something of a control freak, Vladimir is particular about having things exactly his way, where there isn’t an ounce of recognition or awareness of how he’s treating his wife, while she dutifully submits to each and every one of his commands, never expressing any sign of resentment.  Under the surface, however, she is boiling at her husband’s refusal to take her family seriously.  For all practical purposes, this is the set up, with no other background information provided other than the acute visual detail captured by cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who worked on the director’s earlier films as well, and the splendid intermittent use of the 3rd Movement of Phillip Glass’s Symphony #3, a tense and pulsating use of throbbing strings that effectively becomes the voice of the subconscious.  Vladimir’s sense of control can be see in this wordless car driving sequence that expresses a rather sophisticated sense of choice, Elena (2011) - Car driving scene - YouTube (2:46), where the haunting Glass music comes in at the end.  Shortly afterwards, he suffers a heart attack at the gym, literally forcing him to confront his mortality.  One of the best scenes in the film is the hospital visit by his daughter, the simply brilliant Elena Lyadova, who is haughty and cynical, just like her father, but surprisingly eloquent, Elena 2011 - YouTube  (5:16), where the cameraman can’t take his gaze off her fascinating performance.  This visit seems to solidify his view that he needs to write a will, informing Elena that she will receive a generous monthly stipend, but his daughter will inherit everything else.  This sends Elena into a state of flux, her hopes for her son dashed, as she sees Katerina as a spoiled and ungrateful child, someone who couldn’t be less appreciative of her father, only using him for money.  With few spoken words between the two of them, Elena has to wordlessly convey the plaguing guilt of the young Raskolnikov, as she wonders if righting a wrong by committing an unthinkable mortal sin is permissible if it’s in pursuit of a higher purpose, where her transformation is chilling.   

Like the novel, the film barely touches upon the crime, but lingers instead on the unintended interior consequences of the punishment, where Elena skillfully covers up the tracks of her foul deed, where earlier in the film Katrina understood her well, claiming she played the part well of a mournful and grieving wife, where in the hospital her words to her father haunt the final moments of the film, like a Macbethian witch’s prophecy: “It’s irresponsible to produce offspring that you know are going to be sick and doomed, since the parents are just as sick and doomed.”  If Zvyaguintsev films produce anything, they brilliantly foreshadow a bleak future, where Elena struggles with a Mephistophelian choice to prevent a gloomy future for her grandson Sasha, where his parents are elated when she suddenly has available cash to bribe his way into college, rescuing her grandson from the inevitable fate of being forced to join the army, seen as a fate worse than prison.  He barely acknowledges her actions however, much like Elena feared Katerina would react, when the director then shows us the real face of the Russian future.  As the electricity goes out in the tenement housing projects turning the apartment dark, Sasha goes outside and joins a gang of others waiting for him that get liquored up, and in an exquisite example of the best uses of a hand-held camera, follow the group as they hastily approach a clearing in front of the nuclear power smokestacks with the precision of a military strike, where in a riveting sequence they attack a group of outsiders huddling next to a fire, savagely kicking and beating them all to within an inch of their lives, a senseless act of ultraviolence that’s right out of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), a stormtrooping, boot-kicking, neo-Nazi vision of disillusioned youth that’s becoming all too common an occurrence these days, almost always alcohol fueled.  Like the wordless emptiness of the opening sequence, the final sequence is eerily similar, with the tenement dwellers now inhabiting the luxurious condo, bringing with them their learned habits of drunken idleness and shirking responsibility, soulless creatures who are literally pretenders to the human race.