"Leviathan" is a powerful and gorgeous-to-look-at new film by Russian Director Andrey Zvyagintsev. The film is causing a flap in Russia - for being "anti-Russian."
At a recent screening in New York the director described "Leviathan" as a universal story of man versus the all powerful, unchecked state, but one with a distinctly Russian flavor. He said he got the idea from an incident in the US when a mechanic went on a rampage with a bulldozer, flattening the town hall and the mayor’s house over a zoning dispute.
"Leviathan" is set in an austerely beautiful and remote part of north-western Russia on the Barents Sea. The story follows Kolya a mechanic who is slowly crushed by corrupt provincial leaders and the judicial system as he resists their efforts to seize his land. In the end his house is flattened by the government's bulldozer.
The film casts Putin's political machine, the judicial system, and the Russian Orthodox church in a very bad light. Ironically the film was partly funded by the Russian Ministry of Culture. The film has just won a Golden Globe for best foreign film and is on the short-list for the Oscars.
According to the FT:
“In an interview, Mr Zvyagintsev said he did not intend Leviathan as a political treatise against the Putin regime. Recent geopolitical events, he said, had overtaken the film’s release. “The story is completely universal, not just in a special geographical context but in the sense of time. It’s not about a concrete era,” he said. “It just so happens that the era in which we filmed it bears a little bit too much resemblance to [current events].”