Reeling in the Beast

Every few years, Australians get a chance to see a Russian film that captures prevailing perceptions of the Eastern European country in the global political context. Rarely, however, are these films dark social parables that are at once critical of the Russian regime and yet deeply infused by a paradoxically very Russian, anti-Russian sensibility.

The discourse surrounding Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan (2014) following its wins at last year’s Cannes and this year’s Golden Globes highlights its ­perversity. While the film was demonised domestically, it was (reluctantly) nominated by the Russian film board as the country’s official entry for the 2015 Academy Awards. The film received substantial funding from the Ministry of Culture, but was subsequently condemned as exploiting anti-Russian sentiments to gain international success. It has also polarised audiences – for instance, although some Facebook friends of Australia’s Russian Resurrection Film Festival (which I curate) wrote vehement condemnations of the film and its promotion, preview screenings were packed and the Q&A with former foreign-affairs minister Bob Carr (and yours truly) invited polite, lively discussion.

Leviathan is a dark, depressing film, but not as sombre and terrifying as other recent Russian fare such as Yuriy Bykov’s The Fool (2014) and The Major (2013), or Twilight Portrait (Angelina Nikonova, 2011) and My Joy (Sergei Loznitsa, 2010), to name just a few. It is an auteurist film with a recognisable somewhat-detached European style, yet it has gained an unexpectedly broad mainstream viewership and is even described by The New York Times as ‘Russia’s greatest cinematic accomplishment in years’.^[1]Neil MacFarquhar, ‘Russian Movie Leviathan Gets Applause in Hollywood but Scorn at Home’, The New York Times, 27 January 2015, <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/28/world/europe/leviathan-arussian-movie-gets-applause-in-hollywood-but-scorn-at-home.html>, accessed 8 May 2015. Contrarily, as a film with a strong aesthetic focus and unconventional directorial choices, it appears aberrantly didactic, abnegating the symbolist aesthetic that made the director a darling of the European film-festival circuit. Although it criticises the Eastern Orthodox Church, Leviathan treats the interpretation of the Book of Job seriously and interrogates issues of faith and moral actions as well as the uneasy connection between the Church and political authorities. Indeed, Zvyagintsev’s fourth feature continues his exploration of religion, tragic human drama and moral decay – only, here, there is a stronger emphasis on corruption and the sense of hopelessness wrought by an unseen and unseeing brutality, depicted visually amid desaturated but epic desolation. Leviathan raises the question of what a man should do when his ancestral lands are being taken from him: yield and negotiate, or fight pig-headedly against the ­enormous might of a cynical, brutal state?

In various interviews, the filmmaker has been at pains to emphasise that Leviathan is a ‘universal’, ‘eternal story’.^[2]Andrey Zvyagintsev, quoted in Serge Levchin, ‘The Paradoxes of Leviathan: A Discussion with Andrei Zvyagintsev’, RogerEbert.com, 24 December 2014, <http://www.rogerebert.com/balder-and-dash/the-paradoxes-of-leviathan-a-discussion-with-andrei-zvyagintsev>, accessed 8 May 2015. He claims that it was inspired by the ‘Killdozer rampage’ story of Colorado muffler repairman Marvin Heemeyer,^[3]ibid. who destroyed the local town hall and the former mayor’s house using an armour-plated bulldozer in response to being fined for a zoning dispute. But what is fascinating to observe is how Zvyagintsev’s retelling transposes this universal tale of a battler confronting the oppression of the state into a specifically Russian milieu.

Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a respected mechanic whose life is filled with mixed fortunes. He is on good terms with the police, but is in trouble with the law; he is married to the beautiful Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and enjoys various friendships, but is ultimately betrayed by his nearest and dearest; he is both happy and miserable. He lives in a simple wooden house that looks down on the Teriberka River and the expanses of Russia’s northern wilderness, and this dwelling has been owned by his family for many generations. But it is rare in Russia to have this sort of lasting connection to the land – and to even own a family home – given the country’s history of war, displacement, forced property nationalisation and economic turbulence. In Leviathan, these complications are deftly encapsulated in the character of the crooked mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov, seemingly reprising his regular role of crooked cop or shifty bureaucrat in Russian films), who covets Kolya’s land and eventually acquires it through underhanded court action.

Critics ignored Zvyagintsev’s Old Testament parables, his construction of contemplative symbolism, the powerfully elicited performances and his masterful withholding of key moments of action, in favour of seeing Leviathan as a purely polemical film disparaging Vladimir Putin’s reign.

Kolya, however, has a hardened northern ­disposition, and believes in himself and his abilities. He is also a fool – he has a blind faith in the Russian legal system, and rebelliously ignores the established structures of authority. Kolya decides to take on Vadim by calling on his old army comrade, Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) – now a hot-shot Moscow lawyer – to aid him. Recognising that a formal appeal of the case is fraught with failure, Dmitriy confronts Vadim with a large file of documents detailing the politician’s corruption over the years; he then offers to destroy the documents in exchange for the return of Kolya’s land. But this does not silence the mayor; rather, it spurs him to summon his troops and declare war on the apostates. We subsequently learn that Dmitriy’s focus is not just on the case – he and Lilya are having an affair – and, following a series of misjudgements and betrayals, Kolya’s fate spirals out of control. In a moment of drunken honesty, Vadim reminds Kolya: ‘You have never had any rights. You don’t have them now, and you never will!’

The Book of Job

Like Heemeyer, Kolya takes on the state, knowing that there can be no victory, but feeling that he has no choice. Unlike the Colorado man, he has little agency and no appetite for vengeance – Kolya is betrayed by his friend and by the system that was always skewed against him. In this way, his plight mirrors those of similar antiheroes in a spate of recent Russian films who take on corruption and criminality but, despite their best efforts, come up short. A particularly striking analogue is found in Bykov’s The Fool: a plumber (Artyom Bystrov) ignores his own safety in his obstinate dedication to save the residents of an apartment block that is about to collapse after years of government inaction. He is ultimately destroyed by the officials he was trying to assist, and by the residents whose lives he was desperately trying to save.

Like Bykov’s plumber, Kolya is pushed to his extreme in his desire to adhere to his moral code. Shuddering in the depths of despair, Kolya meets a modest, cassock-wearing priest at a grocery store and asks him, ‘Where is your merciful God?’ The priest responds by quoting a passage from the Book of Job:

Can you pull in Leviathan with a fishhook, or tie down its tongue with a rope? Can you put a cord through its nose or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it keep begging you for mercy? Will it speak to you with gentle words?^[4]Job 41:1–3 (New International Version), available at Bible Hub, <http://biblehub.com/niv/job/41.htm>, accessed 7 May 2015.

The homily does not salve Kolya’s broken heart, nor does it provide him any answers, but it does announce the film’s fundamental dramatic question: should Russians follow the old ways of meekness, grinning and bearing the degradation dealt upon them by their rulers, or should they challenge their fate and overcome their hopelessness?

Anti-Russian

That Leviathan was an Oscar favourite for Best Foreign Language Film amid the background of the ­ongoing conflict in Ukraine further foregrounded the film’s political aspects in the lead-up to its general release. The film was widely slammed as ‘anti-Russian’, and the Oscar nomination was seized on as further evidence of Western attempts to besmirch Russia.^[5]Veteran Russian journalist Vladimir Posner, for instance, describes the film as ‘the work of some kind of fifth column of Russia-phobes who are paid by the West to do their anti-Russian work’; see MacFarquhar, op. cit. Critics ignored Zvyagintsev’s Old Testament parables, his construction of contemplative symbolism, the powerfully elicited performances and his masterful withholding of key moments of action, in favour of seeing Leviathan as a purely polemical film disparaging Vladimir Putin’s reign. The Russian culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, acknowledged Zvyagintsev’s directorial talents but firmly disavowed the film, claiming that it opportunistically exploited anti-Russian sentiments in the West in order to gain international awards.^[6]Oleg Karmunin, ‘Владимир Мединский: «Левиафан запредельно конъюнктурен» [Vladimir Medinsky: “Leviathan Is Endlessly Opportunistic”]’, Izvestia, 15 January 2015, <http://izvestia.ru/news/581814>, accessed 8 May 2015. He also accused Leviathan of promoting ‘existential hopelessness’, claiming that ‘there is not a single positive hero and the characters are not real Russians’.^[7]Martin Chilton, ‘Oscar Nominated Leviathan Sparks Russian Row’, The Telegraph, 5 February 2015, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/film/oscars/11357997/Oscar-nominated-Leviathan-sparks-Russian-row.html>, accessed 8 May 2015. His comments were supported by a spokesman for the Orthodox Church, Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who alleged that the writers ‘probably wanted to please the West with these notions of Russian vodka, messy licentiousness, a terrible state system, a Church that is also terrible’, while admitting to illegally downloading the film.^[8]Vsevolod Chaplin, quoted in ‘Russian Orthodox Church Says Leviathan Panders to Western Prejudice’, The Moscow Times, 21 January 2015, <http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article.php?id=514716>, accessed 8 May 2015.

In the face of Western condemnation, many Russians are rallying around positive images of national culture in a show of solidarity; thus, a film that both openly criticises the authorities and is celebrated abroad entangles potential audiences in ambivalence.

To put this into context, Leviathan is far from the only tragic, unrelentingly negative film about Russian society. There exists an entire genre of such films, known as chernukha,^[9]Chernukha refers to Russian films that can be described as grim noir or pessimistic neo-naturalism; for further reading, see Seth Graham, ‘Chernukha and Russian Film’, Studies in Slavic Cultures, issue 1, January 2000, <http://www.pitt.edu/~slavic/sisc/SISC1/graham.pdf>, accessed 8 May 2015. which emerged in the late 1980s. Some of these films – such as Vasili Pichul’s famous Little Vera (1988) – are celebrated in the West for their original voices and displays of auteurist skill, and have screened at major international festivals to high acclaim. Yet, while their accolades have been celebrated in the Russian press, these films rarely find a sizeable audience at home. What is different now is the political context. In the face of Western condemnation, many Russians are rallying around positive images of national culture in a show of solidarity; thus, a film that both openly criticises the authorities and is celebrated abroad entangles potential audiences in ambivalence. Nonetheless, the suggestion that Leviathan’s awards are part of an orchestrated, international anti-Russian crusade is ridiculous. It would be akin to claiming that the commendations earned by Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton, 2009) were part of an international plot to shame Australia, or that the Palme d’Or for Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore, 2004) was a calculated ploy to dishonour the US. Ultimately, it is a politically expedient manoeuvre on the part of the pro-Kremlin lobby to shame the filmmakers and reproach these Western awards, rather than addressing the real issues raised by the film.

The controversy surrounding the film was so significant that, in January 2015, the Russian authorities introduced laws that would allow the government to deny a distribution licence for any film deemed to contain ‘materials, information or data besmearing the national culture, creating a threat to the national unity and national security’.^[10]‘Russian Culture Ministry Reverses Plans to Ban Films That Undermine “National Unity”’, The Moscow Times, 20 January 2015, <http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/russian-culture-ministry-reverses-plans-to-ban-films-that-undermine-national-unity/514631.html>, accessed 8 May 2015. While that law was quickly overturned following stinging criticism from the film industry, the implication remains that, in future, funding for ‘difficult’ films could be radically curtailed and more overtly nationalistic films would prevail. Medinsky asserts that he sees no sense in funding films that not only criticise but also ‘spit at elected authorities […] Why would we? It would be a kind of state masochism.’^[11]Vladimir Medinsky, quoted in Leonid Bershidsky, ‘An Oscar Nomination, Putin and the Truth’, Bloomberg View, 14 January 2015, <http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-01-14/an-oscar-nomination-putin-and-the-truth>, accessed 8 May 2015. In response, Zvyagintsev openly criticised Medinsky in a Guardian interview, calling for his dismissal and describing the minister’s now-infamous quote ‘Let all the flowers grow, but we will only water the ones we like’ as a ‘direct violation of the ­constitution [… and] human expression’.^[12]Andrey Zvyagintsev, quoted in Shaun Walker, ‘Leviathan Director Andrei Zvyagintsev: “Living in Russia Is like Being in a Minefield’, The Guardian, 7 November 2014, <http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/nov/06/leviathan-director-andrei-zvyagintsev-russia-oscar-contender-film>, accessed 8 May 2015.

Untameable

For typical arthouse fare with a swathe of festival awards, Leviathan has done remarkably well in the mainstream – especially when compared to Zvyagintsev’s earlier internationally celebrated films Elena (2011) and The Return (2003). In the US, following the Golden Globes, the film picked up more than US$1 million at the box office.^[13]‘Leviathan (2014)’, Box Office Mojo, <http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=leviathan2014.htm>, accessed 8 May 2015. Released in Australia following its loss at the Academy Awards, it had raced to over A$530,000 by mid April after screening across sixteen cinemas.^[14]‘Box Office’, Urban Cinefile, 16 April 2015, <http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/boxoffice.asp>, accessed 8 May 2015. In Russia, the results were even more striking, given that, prior to the film’s release, producer Alexander Rodnyansky estimated that there were more than 2 million (illegal) downloads.^[15]See Ali Sar, ‘Leviathan Is Close Favorite as Oscars Draw Near’, The Moscow Times, 19 February 2015, <http://www.themoscowtimes.com/article/516258.html>, accessed 8 May 2015. The film raked in 93 million rubles (A$2.3 million) across more than 600 screens, with 349,000 people seeing it over two months.^[16]‘Левиафан [Leviathan]’, Kinometro, <http://www.kinometro.ru/release/card/id/17415>, accessed 8 May 2015. As Rodnyansky has mused:

Our film opened to 50 million rubles [A$1.26 million]. This is a breakthrough for a Russian auteur’s film […] No one ever opened to these [first-week] numbers and especially with such a number of illegal downloads.^[17]Alexander Rodnyansky, quoted in Sar, op. cit.

It is surprising just how many people saw the film in theatres, considering it was well known not to have been the ‘director’s cut’, but rather a redacted version resulting from new legislation making swearing in the arts and media illegal.^[18]See Ekaterina Sivkova, ‘Art and Politics: Film Censorship in Soviet Russia’, The Telegraph, 24 December 2014, <http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/rbth/culture/11312205/film-censorship-soviet-russia.html>, accessed 8 May 2015. Contrary to rumours, Rodnyansky claims that neither he nor Zvyagintsev intentionally ­encouraged the Russian public to watch the film illegally, clarifying that their message was: ‘if a theater is not accessible and there is no way “Leviathan” will be broadcast on TV, then we wouldn’t really mind if the film was downloaded’.^[19]Rodnyansky, quoted in Sar, op. cit.

Leviathan has clearly benefited from all the controversy, as have some of the figures and institutions promoting free speech;^[20]Anastasia Borik cites opposition newspaper Novaya Gazeta and radio station Echo of Moscow as some of Leviathan’s supporters; see Borik, ‘Debating the Symbolic Meanings of Charlie Hebdo and Leviathan’, Russia Direct, 17 January 2015, <http://www.russia-direct.org/russian-media/debating-symbolic-meanings-charlie-hebdo-and-leviathan>, accessed 10 May 2015. there has been a decided absence of meekness in the face of the authorities. But the question still remains: who is this Leviathan that the priest speaks of? Is it the film’s central image – a giant sea creature that is now a beached, decaying skeleton ruefully observed by a boy staring out to sea? Or is it the Hobbesian treatise on the rational state that ‘elevates’ its citizens above the natural condition of chaotic self-interest, but, here, similarly falling apart from a lack of humanity? Tellingly, it is both – a deteriorating monster that is hopelessly untameable.

http://www.palacefilms.com.au/leviathan/