Andrey Zvyagintsev (Russia, born 1964)

Leviathan (2014)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Leviathan is a grim Russian drama that focuses grimly on a small group of characters who struggle, argue, threaten, betray and sometimes even physically attack each other as they attempt- and fail- to find some peace or equilibrium in their harsh existence.  

They’ve been brought to this by political and administrative iniquity. It’s left completely down to the viewer to decide if these people would have peaceful, contented lives if it were not for this specific problem, though the movie certainly seems to imply that their issues run rather deeper, and that the oafish, monstrous presence of the megalomaniacal local political official is merely a manifestation of more abstract, ingratiated difficulties, the kinds of things that, in our own ways, ‘we all struggle with’.

It’s a tough, powerful, uncompromising piece of work that pulses with uneasiness and gnaws at the viewer with its discordant notes. It is also, at times, extremely beautiful, shot through with insistent natural images that provide moments of stability in this study of lives being torn asunder by circumstance, malice, and selfishness, but that also, despite their beauty, somehow seem to pulse with uneasiness too. 

It’s an alienating experience for the viewer. We find out almost nothing about the small coastal community these people inhabit, so narrow is Zvyagintsev’s focus. He does not ask you to like any of his characters, and they proceed to consistently behave in ways you wish they wouldn’t, often erring on the self-destructive. Perhaps the most relatable of the group drops out of the narrative completely two-thirds of the way in. Nevertheless, with the exception of the film’s clear villain, they’re not bad people, and therein lie the film’s most basic, fundamental tensions and complexities. Powerlessness. Lack of control over one’s own impulses and life in general. The ruthless immutability and intransigence of time.

On the one hand, Zvyagintsev presents these characters and events to us with the matter-of-fact air of a documentarian. On the other, he employs a distinctly literary proclivity, pulled straight from the pages of Hemingway or Raymond Carver, to leave great swathes of the story, including information that one could fairly consider crucial, off-camera. Maybe this proclivity is what separates Leviathan from a standard, thoroughly unremarkable kitchen-sink drama, the like of which we’ve seen dozens of times, and makes the film, amongst other things, sleeker, slipperier, more mysterious. Or maybe it’s the insistent, ultra-natural dialogue that completely avoids tired cliché, plot expediency of any kind, and the general pitfalls of lazy writing. Maybe it’s those more usual elements which most commonly provide distinction in these instances- the tone, the pacing, the overt arthouse stylings, the elevated levels of acting and cinematography. But maybe it’s something else, something far less easily definable, that makes the film so beguiling, so ingratiating- that is, genuine insight into the human condition. More so than the previous three films, Leviathan resembles a visual novel; it’s novelistic in the handling of its themes, in the way it takes relatively mundane subject matter and uses it to make points about human beings’ struggle with sentience, especially when striving for virtue.

The performances are excellent, if occasionally perhaps a little overwrought. If I were to pick a standout performer, it would be Elena Lyadova as Lilya, a woman whose delicate features hum with unspoken ennui, whose stoicism collapses into a rictus of pain when she is on her own, away from others. She is, arguably, the human centre of the movie, the point where audiences might most clearly turn to dish out their empathy, and the actress rises to this responsibility with aplomb.

Criticisms? Well, the film’s villain was a bit cartoonish, which was probably deliberate. And the Philip Glass score, so effective in the right film, did not, for me, work particularly well in this one.

The Return (2003) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

I began my Leviathan review by stating that it was ‘a grim Russian drama that focuses grimly on a small group of characters who struggle, argue, threaten, betray and sometimes even physically attack each other as they attempt- and fail- to find some peace or equilibrium in their harsh existence.’

Well, here I ‘return’ to Andrey Zvyagintsev, and these same themes again. Maybe I shouldn’t be talking about Leviathan at all, and instead be trying to judge this film entirely on its own merits, but although this is very much a distinct work with its own distinct qualities, the parallels with the director’s later movie are too numerous and too strong to be ignored completely.

And yes, this is another grim movie, evidenced from an early stage by the incredibly sparse, austere décor of the house that the unnamed mother character and her two sons live in. It is also one which is characterised by disagreements and tension. They haven’t seen the father for 12 years, which is unexplained, and he has now come back, which is also unexplained. We are never told where he’s been, what he wants, or what his relationship with the mother was like. This technique of omission, when handled well, can be very effective, and in Zvyagintsev’s hands, it speaks to a level of narrative control and craftsmanship which is outright masterful. In any case, these omissions mirror the story itself, which is centred around a certain amount of confusion and dislocation.

This is a more simplistic movie than Leviathan, and it generally feels like a slighter one- not necessarily a bad thing, especially when Leviathan was such a weighty piece anyway. With 11 years between the two movies, one would naturally conclude that Leviathan represents an artist who is operating at a higher, more developed level of maturity. But a viewer has to ask themselves if The Return really is slighter, necessarily, or just happens to have a more minimalist dynamic, though it’s probably both. I commented on the narrowness of Zvyagintsev’s focus when reviewing Leviathan, and here it is even narrower; essentially, we are only given three characters, two of whom are adolescents, and their story covers only a few scant days.

There are echoes of The White Ribbon in its questioning of how valid a disciplinarian parenting style is; where we identify the point at which a parent is administering too much discipline, too harshly, and a sense of balance has been lost. Then, there is a counter-argument that Vanya, the younger brother- a terrific, focused performance from the young Ivan Dobronravov- is needlessly hostile to his father, makes a conscious choice to ignore the warnings and punishments that are doled out, and is ultimately responsible for the film’s chain of events to a degree that cannot be fully excused by his youth.

Leviathan was the first movie in which I compared the filmmaking technique to that of a prose stylist. I’ve touched on this theme a few times since, perhaps most notably with Margaret, but of all the directors so far that I have looked at and covered, Zvyagintsev is definitely the one whose movies I feel most strongly resemble novels; in The Return’s case, a novel that is short, stark, and suffused with a singular strain of natural imagery both exquisitely beautiful and hopelessly unforgiving.