I Would Like to See It: Leviathan

Who eats, and who is eaten? Who drinks, and who is drained dry? Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan is preoccupied with such questions of hierarchy and gross exercise of power. The seizure of handyman Kolya’s (Aleksei Serebryakov) land and home by mayor Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the affair between Kolya’s wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and his former army junior turned social superior and attorney Dima (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), even the eponymous leviathan itself, its bones beached and left to erode in the cold salt wind by the recession of the sea. In one sequence Dima seeks to lodge an official complaint over obviously corrupt treatment of his client only to discover that no one eligible is around to receive it, no one knows where they are, and there’s no way to tell when they’ll be back. As he wanders from understaffed police offices to empty government buildings the sense that he’s swum out of his depth begins to mount. It’s not a petty irritation he’s encountering, but the empty waters that signal the approach of something dangerous.

Mikhail Krichman’s expert cinematography sketches the desolation of the fictional coastal town of Pribrezhny (real-life Teriberka) with exacting clarity. Rarely has anything shot digitally justified its brutally clear resolution so well as Leviathan does with its shots of urban decay and the stark natural beauty of the Barents coast. Even the seamed and weathered faces of its characters demand close focus. The film is immaculately lit, and the bleakness of its color palette makes the bleached white of the leviathan’s  bones and the occasional pops of faded blue and green feel like an assault. Even these marks of comparative vividness are in the process of fading away, being digested in the vast, corrosive crucible of a country obsessed with cannibalizing itself at every turn. Vadim helps himself to Kolya’s land. With Kolya under duress, Dima takes his wife as a fringe benefit in exchange for his legal services. The town pillages the sea and the fish it reaps in turn weigh down the city’s women with the back-breaking labor of their butchering and disposal.

The human machinery of Pribrezhny only works in one direction, and attempts to reverse its action result in the dissident party getting ground into red paste. With each successive act the film pulls back from its central cast to expose the reality of their situation, further illuminating the degree to which their social betters consider them non-people, fundamentally devoid of value and being. It’s not that brutal, domineering Vadim is some kind of ubermensch subjugating his constituents out of sheer instinctual cruelty, but that the people he crushes in the course of doing business are not contained in any meaningful way within the moral scope of his life. In his final appearance, after every one of the film’s other central players has vanished from the narrative, we see him at his kindest and most deferential, shepherding his son through a church service, doting on his wife, and boasting of the new church he means to build on the land he’s seized from Kolya, now framed and disappeared into the prison system. Does the whale think about the plankton it sieves from the sea? You know the answer to that yourself.