Leviathan, the new film by Russian master Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Elena), was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, won the Golden Globe in the same category, as well as Best Screenplay at Cannes. It takes its title from the Book of Job and is a synonym for any large sea creature, often great whales. But it also refers to the classical book Leviathan, by Thomas Hobbes, which deals with the structure of society and legitimate government and proposes that a model state protects its citizens from being left to their own devices, outside of any effective help.
Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a working-class handyman who owns a small, yet somewhat cozy house in a small town on the coast of the Barents Sea in Northwest Russia, more precisely on the Kola Peninsula.
The place used to be a prosperous fishing community, but it now amounts to a vast terrain littered with pieces of wood and scattered bones, nothing but remains of ships and whales.
Having a hard time to make ends meet, Kolya leads a difficult life with her young, good-looking yet depressed wife Lylia (Elena Lyadova), and Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev), his teenage son from a previous marriage, with whom Lydia argues at all times.
To top it all, Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the corrupt mayor of the town, can and will manipulate the law to illegally seize Kolya’s land for an underpriced quotation. He intends to build a public centre for his own benefit. But Kolya won’t give in without putting up a fight, and so he asks Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), an old military buddy and a fairly good lawyer residing in Moscow, to help him out in his countersuit against the mayor.
Little did he know that the arrival of Dmitri — who’s not exactly as honest as he thought he was — would bring unforeseen consequences. In the end, Kolya’s futile attempts to get some justice make all the matters worse than he’d ever imagined. The awfully sad irony here is that, as you’d imagine, Kolya is actually not only left to his own devices but, most importantly, he has to struggle against a crooked government the size of two huge whales put together.
With a sense of impending doom from the start, Leviathan’s plot sees that Kolya’s attempts to hold on to what is rightfully his becomes more and more futile. Aided by the Church, the mayor does as he pleases in every which way, because he lives in an world with no law and no God. This way, what happens in this small town on the coast of the Barents Sea becomes a metaphor not only for political disease in Russia, but also for that of many other countries. Just like he did in Elena, Zvyagintsev narrates the story of Kolya with striking realism. Just like Elena, Kolya doesn’t find solace anywhere. But in the end Elena does achieve some kind of triumph — at a high price. Kolya won’t have such luck. Even Dmitri won’t be of any help and will taint an already dirty scenario with betrayal. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise since morals and ethics are nowhere to be found. It seems they got lost long ago together with so many other fundamental things. And what’s lost is lost.
Unfolding at quite a leisurely pace, and never turning into a tedious work, Leviathan is very meticulous in the description of the state of things. Some details may appear somewhat irrelevant at first, but then they acquire sound meanings. Take, for instance, some bits of the emotionally-detached conversations between Kolya and Lylia. Some key events take place offscreen, and so they become more ambiguous. The impressive but austere and never decorative cinematography turns the hostile environment into gloomy internal landscapes inhabiting the characters’ selves. While a discouraging tone is soon established from the first scenes and onwards, it’s during the last third of the film where the bleakness of the panorama hits you like a sledgehammer, right when Kolya is at the end of his tether. And so are his loved ones.
Production notes
Leviathan. Russia, 2014. Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev . Written by Andrey Zvyagintsev, Oleg Negin. With: Aleksei Serebryakov, Roman Madyanov, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Elena Lyadova, Sergey Pokhodaev. Cinematography by: Mikhail Krichman. Music by: Phillip Glass. Produced by Sergey Melkumov. Distributed by: IFA. NC13. Running time: 140 minutes.
