Leviathan (2014)

Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan presents Russian political corruption as theology and myth.  The porcine local official, his bully-boy thugs, and their hapless victims, men and women staggering about in a vodka-induced haze, are not merely specimens on display in this grim tragi-comedy, but, also, figures with Biblical antecedents, the participants in a mystical spectacle that comes to assume apocalyptic dimensions.  This effect arises, in large part, from the film's setting, an Arctic ghost town on the Barents Sea -- mountains of naked rock rise over fjords that seem filled with quicksilver and the light is always ambiguous:  we are never certain whether it is dawn or an overcast mid-day or eerie twilight -- since the film takes place in the summer, I presume that the half-light results from the "Midnight Sun."  A ruined church with a high nave sits in a kind of crater:  when the local kids go there to drink beer, the dome of the wrecked building glows with the amber light of their campfire.  People drive to remote lakes to shoot AK-47's at bottles and pictures of former Soviet leaders.  In this majestic landscape, everyone is constantly stupefied by vodka:  when a local traffic cop, so drunk that he can't keep his eyes open, shuffles away from a party his wife asks:  "Are you okay to drive?"  "I should be," the man says, "I'm a traffic cop."  Filmed at the ghost town of Teriberka on the Kola peninsula (west of Murmansk), the local colony of drunkards lives in tumble-down ruins; a fleet of abandoned fishing vessels rots in the shallows of the harbor and, on the stony tidal flats, the skeleton of a huge whale looms over the desolation.  The whale's skeleton signifies the titular leviathan, a symbol for forces that inexorably grind up human lives.  Chief among those forces is corruption at every level -- the film begins with a lowly traffic copy coercing favors from the film's hero, Kolya; the movie ends with an image of corruption on a transcendental scale -- the Russian Orthodox Church is integral to the graft that the film dramatizes.  In this end-of-the-world landscape, everyone betrays everyone else and the one honest man, an obstinate drunkard, is wholly destroyed.  In some respects, the plot resembles the story in House of Sand and Fog -- a tragedy that evolves from a clash over real estate.  Leviathan is probably the most elaborate film ever made about the legal doctrine of "eminent domain" -- that is, a taking by the State. A fat local politician with little swinish eyes (half-closed because he's always drunk) connives to acquire Kola's property.  Kola owns a ramshackle bungalow with a boat house and some sheds near a bridge crossing the estuary into the town.  Kola lives in that house, where his family has resided since the generation of his grandfather, with his second wife, Lilya, and his son (by his first wife), Roma.  The local grandee has his eyes on Kola's property and the film begins in media res with a judicial tribunal denying Kola's appeal with respect to the taking of his property. (Two of the three female judges are later shown to be in the employ of the official).  Kola has hired a Moscow attorney to assist him, a man named Dmitri ("Dimi") who is ruggedly handsome and, apparently, a close friend from the days of their military service.  Dimi's plan is to blackmail the corrupt politician seeking to expropriate Kola's property -- he has assembled a dossier documenting the politician's horrific misdeeds.  This strategy misfires -- apparently, the powerful act with impunity in Russia because they can afford to have their enemies either killed or brutalized into silence.  Before Dimi is driven out of town, Kola's wife, with whom he seems to have had a past history, sleeps with the lawyer.  Since everyone is drunk all the time, Dimi and Kola's wife, Lilya, are sufficiently disinhibited to be caught in an embrace during the shooting expedition -- an inebriate affair involving machine guns and shish-kebabs commemorating someone's birthday.  Kola beats up Lilya, although they are later reconciled -- copious quantities of vodka can do wonders for a relationship apparently.  Lilya works in a fish packing plant and, after a day or so, seems to regret not fleeing to Moscow with the handsome, if feckless, lawyer.  She goes to a barren promontory, sees a whale emerge from the icy water, and is either murdered or commits suicide.  When her body is found, Kola is charged with murder and convicted -- after all, the people in the shooting party saw him beating her.  His beloved house is demolished -- we see the placid, empty interior suddenly ripped apart by bulldozers.  Zvyagintsev saves the most disheartening surprise for the film's penultimate sequence, a grotesque sermon in a brand-new church that is filmed in a manner very similar to the wedding scene in Muratova's scathing Chekhovian Motifs. At one point, a holy man, an Orthodox monk who seems to have wandered into the film from a Dostoevsky novel, tells the distraught and intoxicated Kola to study the book of Job.  The monk explains that no man can stand against the leviathan -- apparently, the image for corruption pervading every aspect of Russian society.  The monk has purchased a sack full of loaves of bread and distributes those to the poor -- the hero has bought yet another bottle of vodka and he wanders away into the wasteland of decaying shacks and perma-frost to continue his binge.  This is an impressive film and, although its message of quiescent lassitude may be itself be corrupt and corrupting, Leviathan is gripping, beautifully designed, and thought-provoking.