Beautiful, cold and raw is the natural picture that begins with one of Leviathan's most powerful and discussed films before 6 years There are no warm colors here - the world glows cold in gray and blue. The remains of some poorly accomplished human endeavors - rotting parts of boats lie like carcasses after a lost battle along the North Sea coast, to the dead bones of a blue whale. There are no fields covered with clinging golden classes and fruit-trees. There are no birds - here are monsters, this is the land of the Leviathan(s). Under the sounds of Philippe Glass's magnificent-alarming-hypnotic music, the ocean waves crumble and foam the bare rocks in cold indifference to people and their needs. These are the first footage of the movie - they can make you both good and bad and clear that this story will not end well. Right now and at this exact place - there is no way. This location is perfect for vodka-drenched, anti-clerical, dirty, cold gray Russian horror. A movie to show the end of an era. So, as, another great Russian director showed in "Cargo 200" the end of another dark epoch (albeit with 20 years of delay).
In the small town of Obrezjeni, on the rocks near the bay, in whose unsettled waters sometimes play sea monsters, there is a house. Nicholas lives with his wife Lilia and 14-year-old Roman, his son from his first wife. Nikolay is a mechanic, often forced to repair free of charge old Niva's lieutenant colonel Degtjayov, head of the local traffic police, but in a more friendly relationship with his subordinate Pojilov and his wife Angela. Nikolay's problem is that the corrupt mayor of the city is about to take everything - the home, the workshop, the land - with the power of the entire state machine and the complicated blessing of the church. And against 639 thousand rubles (about 13 thousand euros) determined by the corrupt court, an amount that does not even reach for a small apartment in the city. To help Nikolay arrived from Moscow his comrade from the Dmitry Seleznyov barracks. Seleznyov is a lawyer and as such does not feed any illusions about the system; knows that the court and prosecution have nothing to do with justice. He also knows that the property can not be saved but hopes at least to get a more decent amount. To this end, he collected a folder of compromising information to blackmail the mayor in his own cabinet, under the suspicious look of Putin's portrayal of the portrait.Without more details, we will add that a whole bunch of misfortunes will accumulate on the malicious head of the carmaker. His question to the sky, "Why?" Will have no answer, except the universal explanation for the "unseen ways of the God" that fits anywhere where there is nothing to say. And at the end, in the new church at the place of the Nicholas' house, a bishop pronounces a sermon that will remain in the history of cinema as a model for skillful use of the double sinister meaning, which sometimes conceals beautiful words like "righteousness", "truth" , "Faith", "freedom" ...
As a cinema, "Leviathan" has very strong qualities. In the whole movie - 2 hours and 20 minutes, with the full range of feelings the actors had to deal with, there was no fake actor's note. At the request of the director, actress Anna Ukolova, uploaded 15 kg. for filming - in a way that is obviously no longer a trademark of only perplexing Hollywood stars. The operator's work with long, silent footage, smooth camera movements, hypnotizing slow approaching transition from common to close-ups, the cool tone of lighting - all of this also works flawlessly for the cause of the movie. Music - no. The excerpts from Phil Hellmuth's opera "Echnaton" sound - and play their role perfectly - only during the opening and closing inscriptions. "Leviathan" is a free interpretation of the bible story of Job with a thick criminal and tribal love thread in the conditions of modern Russia - that is to say, monstrous villains will not face heroes, but ordinary little people - "insects living in shit" a moment of drunken revelation is called the mayor. Nicolay is nobody - "You never had any rights and you will not have!", Screaming in his face the face of the state. And a happy end, as in the fully fictional biblical story (And Job's die old and happy) is not possible. "If I had figured out an end in which justice triumphs, no one who lived in Russia would believe me," admits director Andrei Zvyagintsev. Leviathan has triumphed around the world, won the Golden Globe, awards from Cannes, London, Munich, Abu Dhabi, Oscar nominees, and the British Cinema Academy Award ... But in his homeland he was met with mixed reactions. Even before leaving, Leviathan was subjected to a heavy shot of cluster bombs, depleted uranium and chemical ammunition. The nuclear attack, however, came from the church - and from an old tradition (from the days of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov) by people who have not seen it.
For example, a patriotic priest who, in general, did not go to the cinema, has taken a video full-length review. In essence, the two-hour anti-leviathan lecture comes down to the fact that every Russian film that received European awards is anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox. An Orthodox film critic also points to some of Zygytinev's factual mistakes - for example, a Russian priest would not even meet a mayor suspected of corruption. Moreover, Prierezhny was not a district town, and there was nothing to do with the archbishop. Such views are no exception, the church officially requested the film to be banned. The press has also split into two, even three or four or five or six: some like the movie because it's a "brutal portrait of modern Russia, a monstrous Leviathan who does not even try to like you, rude, , with lots of vodka, anger and wantonness. " Others do not like it for the same reason, considering it as "the director's attempt to address important issues in which he has not been able to understand." Third, as one deputy. minister, declared it "the next Rashka-govnyskaya style cinema. An angry political scientist called it a "anti-Russian political order, shot with state money". And they should be proud of this fact. State support for Leviathan is a clear sign that Russia is still not there where it has gone. According to the fourth, the film is good because it represents a universal (and not purely Russian) conflict between God and Satan for the human soul. Leviathan was Satan, not a symbol of state power, for which the individual does not mean anything.
Zygyantsev himself explains, "I did not want to expose myself to anyone or anyone." For many years, he had watched life in the country and social order, but his idea came from an actual case that came with the American carmaker Marvin John Chiemmer. After a prolonged conflict with a large company trying to build a plant on the site of his workshop, Marvin crashed, pulled on a bulldozer and managed to bring the company $ 7 million in damages before he shot himself.Zvyagintsev can speak whatever he wants, and convinced as much as his fellow countrymen that Leviathan's history is supranational with American embryos. But just widespread corruption and the merging of state power with the Church is not one of America's many other problems. In fact, in the modern world, this is mostly a Russian problem. Zvyagintsev may even say that he has heard about the work of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, or the question of the form and power of the church and the civil state (1651), during the filming and was surprised by the coincidence. Because Hobbes uses the Leviathan monster as a symbol of the much-waging fusion between state and church authorities. Only those who did not watch the movie will believe it to the end.
