The sad and bitter truth

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes possibly the most anti-romantic movie ever. No, not 50 Shades of Grey. That’s next weekend.

Leviathan may be critically acclaimed (it is) and seem like a frontrunner for the Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and at BAFTA (also true) but none of that is because it’s a warm and fuzzy story where everything works out in the end (it most certainly is not that).

Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s new movie is, however, an impressively told tale of futility, nihilism and the bleakness of life in the face of bureaucratic machinations. It’s as brilliant as it is tragic, and boy, is it ever tragic.

Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a simple man just trying to eke out a meagre existence as a good mechanic in a fishing town on the coast of the Barents Sea, along with his new wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) and teenaged son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev). They have a beautiful house but there is already much trouble in the woodworks, and it is as insidious and pernicious as anything. Sad Lilya is restless for change, while Roma is often in trouble, out drinking in abandoned churches with his delinquent friends. Kolya abides as best he can, and the free-flowing vodka helps tremendously in these and all other matters.

But there’s a fly in the ointment. Enter Vadim (Roman Madyanov), the local mayor with corrupt, ulterior motives. He has designs on acquiring Kolya’s land for a municipal building, and won’t let the poor mechanic’s protestations stop him. Kolya even enlists the help of his friend Dmitri (Vladimir Vdovichenkov) who is an astute and adept lawyer in Moscow to aid him in the political battle.

Sadly, fate has stacked every single card against our hero. I’m really not trying to tell you how this all plays out but it’s important that you know that things do not always work out well. You shouldn’t always go to the cinema, especially the worthy cinema, with the expectation of contrivance and pap, of a smug ending, of an audience-tested film.

If you do then may you always watch Transformers 1 to 4 over and over again.

If you have no such expectations, if you yearn for enrichment, if you understand that tales of fiction can lead to better understandings of the real world outside the theatre doors, then this is a film unlike so many contemporary films out there. It offers a theme without elaborating every detail of its plot. It’s a slow burn of cinders that are fuelled by spurts of gas and burps of wind. Leviathan features some really great shots – some that even beckon for a 70mm presentation – but the content is of the murky ugly corners of human machinations against others in the pursuit of power.

It’s over two hours long and it’s not a happy ride, but it’s well worth it just to see how it ends. Remember: I didn’t say it was a happy ending, only a good one. A very good one.