From the director of
Elena comes
Leviathan (
Левиафан). This Russian drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev and written by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin. Kolya lives in a small fishing town near the stunning Barents Sea in Northern Russia. He owns an auto-repair shop that stands right next to the house where he lives with his young wife Lilya and his son Roma from a previous marriage. The town's corrupt mayor Vadim Shelevyat is determined to take away his business, his house, as well as his land. First the Mayor tries buying off Kolya, but Kolya unflinchingly fights as hard as he can so as not to lose everything he owns including the beauty that has surrounded him from the day he was born. Facing resistance, the mayor starts being more aggressive.
When Zvyagintsev was filming his segment of
New York, I Love You (2008) in the United States, he was told the story of Marvin Heemeyer from Granby, Colorado. Heemeyer was a welder who owned an automobile muffler repair shop and had a conflict with the town authorities that allowed the construction of a cement manufacturing plant next to his shop in 2001. After his appeals over the decision failed, an outraged Heemeyer armored his bulldozer and used it in 2004 to demolish a number of Granby buildings, including the Town Hall, and shot himself before he could be captured. He was amazed by this story and wanted initially to make his film in the US, but then changed his mind. Zvyagintsev and Negin took loose inspiraton from the biblical stories of Job from Uz and King Ahab of Samaria and Heinrich von Kleist's novella
Michael Kohlhaas. By August 2013, Aleksei Serebryakov, Roman Madyanov, Vladimir Vdovichenkov, Elena Lyadova, Anna Ukolova, Igor Savochkin and Margarita Shubina were cast. At the same time, principal photography commenced and wrapped in October. Filming took place in Kirovsk, Monchegorsk, Olenegorsk, near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, as well as Teriberka on the Barents Sea coast.
The film stars Serebryakov, Madyanov, Vdovichenkov, Lyadova, Ukolova, Savochkin and Shubina. The cast takes us into the mind of people who have been pushed by life into an uncomfortable corner where they have to choose between different kinds of choices. That makes a very solid, intense drama.
A riveting domestic thriller, an elegantly crafted glimpse into modern Russian life that speaks volumes while barely saying a word. A class clash potboiler, it's a simple but deliciously hypnotic narrative about wealth and the queer way it tends to push people out of their comfort zones. A chilly noir about the beaten paths and icy ruts of Russian life in the capital, post-Communism. In a land of schemers, the film suggests, the urban cloisters of Moscow's elite are as self-sealing as the lowly masses' stifling Soviet-era flats. It may seem slow and lugubrious but it draws you into these complex, contradictory lives the way a spider lures a fly into a web.
Simon says Leviathan (Левиафан) receives:
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