Leviathan

Leviathan is an anthropological austerity film

By GalaTView Staff

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Lauded Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return) won the Best Screenplay prize at Cannes for this painterly, primordial tale about a proud patriarch fighting to protect his family home from a corrupt local official. Kolia (Alexey Serebryakov) lives in a small fishing town near the stunning Barents Sea in Northern Russia. He owns an auto-repair shop that stands right next to the house where he lives with his young wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and his son Roma (Sergueï Pokhodaev) from a previous marriage. The town’s corrupt mayor Vadim Shelevyat (Roman Madyanov) is determined to take away his business, his house, as well as his land.

No interviews or narration are involved on this great sea film. It’s about North American fishing industry especially when you see prolonged scenes of the deep-sea, severed fish, and seagulls. At 141 minutes, and spoken in Russian, this one. attacks on the state of Russian society today, and the endemic and cynical corruption of all levels and the victims are a poor man with his family.