Leviathan director Andrei Zvyagintsev: ‘Living in Russia is like being in a minefield’
Yes, Leviathan shows ordinary Russians crushed beneath a fiendishly corrupt bureaucracy. But it was inspired by a case in the US, he said, and is intended as a universal parable.
But as soon as we start to speak, it’s as if a dam has broken. Carefully measured allegory is swapped for blunt straight-talking. He pauses only once in 90 minutes – to take a phone call from a friend whose wife is ill. He uses an iPhone 4, which, by the standards of the Moscow beau monde, is the equivalent of packing an old Nokia brick.
He speaks quietly, with consideration – and unmistakable anger.
“
It’s like being in a minefield, this is the feeling you live with here. It’s very hard to build any kind of prospects – in life, in your profession, in your career – if you are not plugged in to the values of the system. It’s a
stupid construction of society, and unfortunately
the eternal curse of our territory.
The ideas of the rule of law, of equal rights are hardly discussed here. There is discussion in society, but it’s pointless. I have a feeling of the
absolute futility of pretending to the right to have a say in any situation. I’ve turned 50 and I’ve never voted in my life. Because I’m absolutely certain that in our system it’s a completely pointless step.”
“The ideas at the heart of it are relevant everywhere,” he smiles. “But of course it’s a film about Russia. It’s a very Russian film.”
quintessentially Russian. And lest we be in any doubt that this is the real, tangible Russia rather than some imaginary, parallel Russia, there are references to Riot and a portrait of Vladimir Putin hangs on the wall of the corrupt mayor’s office.
That picture was there when the crew arrived; they shot in a real government building in a remote northern backwater. Nothing at all needed to be confected or changed.
“We live in a feudal system when everything is in the hands of one person, and everyone else is in a vertical of subordination,” says Zvyagintsev, explaining the power structure of modern Russia that defines the film, where kissing upwards and kicking downwards are the main modes of operation.
“We are reawakening the soul of the Russian people,” intones the film’s imperious bishop, voice shaking with righteous anger as he reels off a list of enemies who would undermine Russia. It is a voice that could come from the daily evening news bulletins on state-controlled television. This bishop, with his gold and mahogany office, contrasts with a local bedraggled priest who gives the distraught Nikolai an impromptu sermon on the tests that God might have in store. Zvyagintsev describes himself as secular, but a believer. When he was 28, he says, he decided he wanted to be christened, only to find out that his grandparents had done this secretly when he was two years old.
Leviathan’s portrayal of a venal, organised church, along with a sickeningly corrupt political system and a sloshed, atomised society, could not be further from the Russia that the authorities want to portray.
Zvyagintsev swims resolutely against the tide. One remark by Russia’s culture minister, Vladimir Medinsky, who, earlier this year, said openly that he did not like Leviathan, seems especially to irritate.
“He said: ‘Let all the flowers grow, but we will only water the ones we like.’ After these words he should have been fired, because this is a direct violation of the constitution, a direct violation of human expression. You cannot impose rules on art. Everybody should be equal. Government help, without which art cannot function, should be equally spread between all participants.”
“A lot of people think that you have to abide by the theory of small actions; that you should do whatever you can from your position. My position is that of a cinema director. I’m not politically active. But I can’t not react to what is happening around me.”
http://www.theguardian.com/film/201...ndrei-zvyagintsev-russia-oscar-contender-film
It is safer for your best directors and writers to say such things officially. After reading up on it (because ending was very complex and deep) many in Russia are saying the film as being very accurate of life inside modern Russia. Though its message and ending are universal and could easily reflect life in modern rural America
