His most recent outing Elena which was also an international success is a much more intimate drama than the sweeping mystical depths of The Return and now The Leviathan.
The film is billed as being a modern day retelling of the Biblical story of Job and the title of the film comes from the Biblical passage where God asks Job if it is possible to draw out Leviathan with a fishhook or press down his tongue with a cord. The Leviathan is a satanic sea monster of unlimited power in the Bible and in literature has also come to be associated with the whale. The image of a whale figures prominently in this film that moves contains many layers of meaning and the bones of a beached whale are seen on the beach near where the action of the film takes place
Zvyanintsev has set his story in a small town near the Barents Sea in northern Russia and his modern day Job is Kolya played by Aleksei Serebryakov who runs his own auto-repair shop and lives apparently happily with his wife Lilya played by Elena Lyadova and his teenage son from a previous marriage Romka played by Sergey Pokhadaev in a modest but beautifully situated house.
The vastness, beauty and power of the landscape plays an important role in the film but it is exactly the beauty of the land where Kolya lives and enjoys as an almost spiritual experience that is exactly what the greedy and corrupt mayor of the town Vadim played by Roman Madyanov wants to take away from Kolya. First Vadim trys to buy off Kolya but beauty has no price and Vadim mounts a campaign to destroy Kolya’s business and his life.
Kolya turns to his best friend Dmitri played by Vladimir Vdovichenkov a Moscow lawyer for help in defending himself against the corrupt powers ranged against him. But Dmitri’s arrival in the village signals an escalation of Kolya’s troubles.
The director has also said that the film’s title refers to Thomas Hobbes’ classic book Leviathan in which the titular creature stands for the state and examines the implications of giving up your liberty to the state in exchange for an ordered society.
This is just one more layer in this ambitious and many layered work. The director is clearly not afraid to tackle life’s biggest issues and he does it not in a preachy way but indirectly through images as all great mythical stories that communicate central truths from the time of the ancient Greek gods until today. The unbridled power and corruption and the impossibility of fighting against this monster becomes the central theme of the film but it goes even deeper and the power and beauty of the landscape as captured by DoP Mikhail Krichman brings meaning and magic to every scene. This is a film so rich in meaning that it needs to be seen more than once to reveal all its layers.
Credits: Leviathan (Russia)
Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev
Cast: Aleksei Serebryakov, Elena Lyadova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Roman Madyanov, Sergey Pokhadaev
