Leviathan (2014 film)

Plot summary

Set in fictional town of Pribrezhny (shot in the coastal town of Teriberka, Murmansk Oblast), Russia, the plot follows the tragic series of events that affect Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov), a hotheaded car mechanic, his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and his teenage son, Roma (Sergey Pokhodyaev). The town's crooked Mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov) has undertaken a legal plot to expropriate the land on which Kolya's house is built.

The mayor's plan is supposedly to build a telecommunications mast on Kolya's property, offering a grossly undervalued sum for compensation, although Kolya believes that his real plan is to build a villa for himself. Kolya's long-time friend Dima (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), a sharp and successful lawyer from Moscow, attempts to fight the expropriation through the local court system.

During the course of the trial, Kolya is arrested for shouting at corrupt police officers in a police station. When the trial rules in favor of the mayor, Dima manages to get him to step back, and to secure Kolya's release from jail, by threatening him with compromising documents. However during Kolya's absence, Lilya engages in an impromptu sexual encounter with Dima.

During an outing with Kolya's friend Ivan Stepanich (Sergei Bachursky), Roma witnesses Lilya and Dima having sex and Kolya finds out about the affair, assaulting the couple. Meanwhile, Mayor Vadim visits his friend, a local Orthodox Church bishop (Valeriy Grishko), for spiritual comfort, who tells him that all power comes from God and encourages him to solve his problems forcefully. Subsequently, Vadim and his thugs abduct Dima and carry out a mock execution, and urge him to return to Moscow. Afterwards Vadim continues his drive at expropriating Kolya's house. The last appearance of Dima shows him looking out the window of a train, ostensibly en route back to Moscow.

Lilya returns home to Kolya, but she is depressed by the public revelation of her affair. While the family is packing to move out, Kolya corners Lilya in the basement and forces her into a spontaneous sexual act. Roma witnesses the event and flees the house, collapsing in tears by a whale skeleton on the shore. He returns home late at night, and explicitly blames Lilya for everything that is going wrong in their lives.

That night, Lilya is unable to sleep and leaves the house in the early morning. The next morning she does not turn up at work and her phone is switched off. Her body is discovered a few days later. A mournful Kolya revs up his drinking habits even more and encounters a priest. He asks him why God is doing this to him. The Orthodox priest, who is a pious man, quotes from the Biblical book of Job, and counsels Kolya that, when Job accepted his fate, he was rewarded by God with a long and happy life.

The next day, Kolya is arrested. The police claim to have evidence that Kolya raped and murdered Lilya with a strike to the head, using a blunt object. Pieces of evidence against him include his and Lilya's own friends' testimonies about threats he made to Lilya and Dima when he discovered their affair, and one of his shop hammers being shaped "similarly" to the wound in her head. Kolya is convicted of murder and sentenced to fifteen years in a maximum-security prison. With no family left, Roma reluctantly agrees to be taken in by Kolya's former friends, to avoid being sent to an orphanage. Mayor Vadim then receives a call informing him of Kolya's sentence, and he gloats and says that Kolya got what he deserved for having stood up against him.

In the end, Kolya's house is torn down and Mayor Vadim's project is revealed: a lavish Orthodox Church for his friend the bishop. The film concludes with a sermon by the bishop, with the mayor in attendance. The bishop extols the virtues of God's truth versus the world's truth, and that good intentions do not excuse evil acts. He urges the congregation not to act with force or cunning, but to put their trust in Christ.

Cast

Production

When Andrey Zvyagintsev produced a short film in the United States, he was told the story of Marvin Heemeyer. He was amazed by this story and wanted initially to make his film in the US, but then changed his mind. The screenplay was written by Zvyagintsev and Oleg Negin and is loosely adapted from the biblical stories of Job from Uz and King Ahab of Samaria and Heinrich von Kleist's novella Michael Kohlhaas. The script features more than fifteen characters, which is unusually many for a film by Zvyagintsev.

Principal photography took place in towns Kirovsk, Monchegorsk, Olenegorsk, near Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula. Preparations on the set began in May 2013. Principal photography took place during three months from August to October the same year. Filming of exterior scenes for Leviathan took place in the town of Teriberka on the Barents Sea coast.

Release

Leviathan premiered at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where it was screened on 23 May. It will be distributed by Sony Pictures Classics in the United States, Curzon Cinemas in the United Kingdom and by Palace Entertainment in Australia and New Zealand.

Critical reception

Peter Bradshaw, writing a full five-star review for The Guardian, gave the film great praise. Bradshaw thought that the film was "acted and directed with unflinching ambition" and described the film as "a forbidding and intimidating piece of work... a movie with real grandeur".

On Metacritic, based on 34 reviews, Leviathan held an average score of 92 out of 100, indicating "universal acclaim". It also has a 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Criticism

Thirty-five percent of the funding for Leviathan came from Russia's Ministry of Culture. However, Vladimir Medinsky, Minister of Culture, a conservative historian, acknowledged that the film showed talented moviemaking, but said he does not like it. He sharply criticized its portrayal of ordinary Russians as swearing, vodka-swigging people, which he does not recognize from his experience as a Russian or that of "Real Russians". He thought it strange that there is not a single positive character in the movie and implied that the director was not fond of Russians but rather "fame, red carpets and statuettes". The Ministry of Culture has now proposed guidelines which would ban movies that "defile" the national culture. In turn, when appearing on oppositional TV channel Dozhd, director Zvyagintsev was criticised by journalist Ksenia Sobchak for accepting government subsidies. Specifically, Sobchak asked whether government funding had had no influence on the content of the movie. In response, Zvyagintsev maintained that he had always felt completely independent from the Ministry in writing and shooting the movie.

Vladimir Posner, a veteran Russian journalist, said: "Anything seen as being critical of Russia in any way is automatically seen as either another Western attempt to denigrate Russia and the Orthodox Church, or it's the work of some kind of fifth column of Russia-phobes who are paid by the West to do their anti-Russian work or are simply themselves profoundly anti-Russian."

Metropolitan Simon of Murmansk and Monchegorsk, the diocese where the movie was filmed, issued a statement calling it "honest". He said that Leviathan raised important questions about the state of the country.

Accolades

On 28 September 2014, it was announced that Leviathan would be Russia's submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 87th Academy Awards. It made the January Shortlist of nine films, before being nominated later that month.

The film was named the Best Film at the London Film Festival Awards on 18 October 2014, at a ceremony where the main prizes went to Russia, Ukraine and Syria, three countries at the centre of long-running conflicts. The winning film-makers all said they hoped that culture could help to restore peace to their countries. It was nominated for and won the Best Foreign Language Film award at the 72nd Golden Globe Awards. The film was adjudged the best film of the 45th International Film Festival of India.

Following the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language film Leviathan was leaked online among some of the other Oscar 2015 nominated films. On 12 January the website "Thank you, Leviathan filmmakers" appeared on the Internet encouraging social media users to contribute any amount as a gratitude to the filmmakers. Alexander Rodnyanskiy, Leviathan's Producer, supported Slava's Smirnov (website's author; independent digital producer) initiative and asked to transfer the money to the "Podari Zhizn'" (Russian: Подари Жизнь, Give Life) charity fund which is held by actresses Chulpan Khamatova and Dina Korzun.