Leviathan

2 more reviews

1. ›REVIEW : "Leviathan" (2014) - Movie by Andrey Zvyagintsev@mandibil2322d

   

   The title immediately reminds me of the 16th century philosopher Hobbes, who was very horny for a state that controlled everything and compared that idea to a fabled sea creature called a "Leviathan" (which also was the title his book). The reference is well placed for this movie which deals with the destructive nature of the state.

   I have roamed around a bit for other reviews of this movie before writing here (which I rarely do btw) and one thing that hit me was how reviewers overwhelmingly see this as a critique of the local "system", which is Russia. Granted, the methods used by those who have violent power over others there, are likely more corrupt and violent than your average old western European or American power hungry political system. But it is an uppercut to any statist system anywhere in the world, as it is a description of the inherent problem in systems that is based on violence. And that is the same for all statist systems around the world, however explicit their violent control is.

   

   

   Koyla is a hot-tempered middle aged mechanic, single father, who has ended up in an unwanted situation with the "authorities". The mayor wants the land upon which he has build his house and is using "expropriation" to get rid of him. But Koyla is not interested in leaving his home.

   It is placed on a hill overlooking a gorgeous bay in the northern, barren parts of Russia. He loves his new girlfriend, but has trouble expressing himself in other than hot headed angry and corporeal ways. His son is in his puberty and understands that the "family" is under stress and it results in various conflicts.

   

   

   An old friend, who is a hot shot lawyer in Moscow, has arrived to help him settle the case in the hope of using the state against itself. The lawyer is less confident of the how easy it will be to dismiss the mayor's intentions in legal ways and tries to make the expropriation money deal instead.

   The conflict between Koyla, the lawyer and the corrupt mayor steadily increases and after Koyla´s girlfriend goes to bed with the lawyer, Koyla kind of looses it and starts burning the bridges. He is in a fight he cannot win and it does not help that he is constantly drinking vodka and basically is a sitting duck for the influential but deeply criminal and corrupt mayor.

   

   

   I have great sympathy for the story/plot in this movie. I can really identify with the feeling of being completely overpowered by a system that basically can squash you like an annoying insect (paraphrasing the movie). The system is rotten to the core. It is baked in the cake. Those who rule you are the same people, basically, who is going to be judging whether or not you are treated ethically. It is a contradiction in self interests.

   Those with power are always going to win one way or another. You might be luvcky to be one of those chosen to represent the illusion of the little "man" able to win over the system to give everyone the idea that there is anything like justice. But that is all a scam to create an illusion.

   

   

   People live everywhere in this illusion, except for a brave few here and there. They actually believe that those who rule over them is going to protect them. And if they are not protected - they tell them selves they deserve the punishment. It is not without cause, that there is a good deal of references to christian aspects in the movie. Christianity is a slave morality, as Nietzsche would have said, and serves as a consolation for how your masters are treating you.

   To paraphrase Nietzsche once more. Everything the state says is a lie and everything it has it has stolen. You can quote me for the addition "Everything it does is to destroy". It will crush anyone who comes in its path, to the extend that people let them do it. A very telling scene is where the bull-dozer tears down his house and we see it from the inside. The room where people have lived, laughed, cried and loved is being torn apart as if nothing really matters. The only thing the state can do is destroy. Everywhere, all the time.

   

   

   The movie is very unsentimental and I like that. On the other hand it has a tendency to be dragging along and certain scenes don't feel necessary to tell the story, which is a combination of the good versus evil in Koyla versus the mayor. The scenery is very bare and beautiful but I see them more as intermissions in the movie than something that works with the story in any way.

   The stories of the boy, the girlfriend the lawyer and a few others are not really fleshed out and in particular I never feel really under the skin of Koyla and experiencing things from his point of view. It is almost as if you are an external viewer looking at a person without anything else to go with than his outbursts and his smoking and drinking (of which there are a lot).

   

   

   This one will get a decent recommendation for picking a topic that is not easy to deal with in a visual manner and for having an unsentimental tone and fairly direct metaphors for the points it is trying to put forth. But it is at times a slow burner where you really have to be in the mood for it, to make it sink in. It may be a bit of an unwarranted critique in some peoples eyes as the drawn out plot may help give the feeling of nothing happening in reality that can help you control that which is out of your control. You only have your hopes and beliefs in the system to hang on to. Still it feels a bit dull to me overall.

   7/10

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2. ›"Leviathan" by Andrey Zvyagintsev - movie review@godflesh3003d

   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.

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