Leviathan
The idea of blogging “Leviathan” is so painful (just like the film) that I almost skipped it to move with the rest of my backlog. To me, it feels like way more than 10 days have passed since I last wrote a blog posting (but then again the last few days felt rather eventful as well) and I had the impression that I am in a huge writer’s slump. In reality, there were 9 days between my postings of “Fitzcarraldo” and “La Ricotta”, and that just shows how much I have been dreading to write about “Leviathan”.
Just like “Biutiful” and a fair number of films I never watched because I thought they would be too painful (“Lilja 4-ever”, “Tess”, and others that I have surely forgotten by now), “Leviathan” follows the formula: “Protagonist leads a terrible life. Then everything gets worse. And worse. And worse. And then it ends in the worst way possible.” That sums up these films pretty perfectly, and it’s only a matter of how we are being hit in the guts throughout the film.
Besides being so… incredibly… sad, I think “Leviathan” also actively makes me uncomfortable, though in this case it’s a sign that the film does an incredibly good job at ripping your heart out and throwing it right in your face. To be honest, I don’t even want to think about the film or discuss its storyline for that reason.
I could also tell that “Leviathan” was even more ambitious than “The Return”, and even though I still vividly remember how awestruck I was for its beauty and lovely religious symbolism, I would say that “Leviathan” fulfilled my high expectations. It was pretty much everything I expected the film to be, and it’s one of these films which has no weakness at all, or so it seems to me. Direction, acting, story-telling, costumes – everything is absolutely perfect. Next to “Melancholia”, it also wins my personal award for the most beautiful interior design of a post-2000 film.
In this respect I am happy that I saw the film in theaters. Its astonishing cinematography makes it absolutely worthwhile, and it actually helps to watch a film of this type in a movie theater because it forces me to focus on it during its 2 1/2 hour run. With that said, we were in the Cinema Paris and it felt like we were there forever. They failed to show the film with subtitles and then they had to start it twice (!) all over again just to realize that the subtitles were still not showing up. At some point they finally made it work, but it made us get out of the theater really late.
This might sound weird, but one of the most memorable scenes in the film was how Dmitri told Lilya he wants to take her to Moscow and she responds by putting a hand on his arm (or stomach?) and saying “Dima” (and then perhaps something else). Even though I don’t remember that scene well, I can still recall how desperate I felt in that moment, even more so than in some of the other more explicitly desperate scenes, like every single time something bad happens yet again to Job… errr, Nikolai, especially the last scene with him when he was already imprisoned.
This ending also is somewhat open to discussion and interpretation. The synopsis on Wikipedia, for example, is quite explicit in its interpretation and it differs from mine. In fact, I would almost say that you can tell how cynical a person has become depending on how bad they think the characters in the film really are. (You have the choice between somewhat bad with some good characteristics or just purely very, very bad.) I thought that was interesting, and considering that I interpreted the characters’ actions in a milder manner than whoever wrote that Wikipedia article, it seems that hope is not yet lost for me, hehe.
Unlike “Slumdog Millionnaire” or a bunch of other Chinese or Iranian films, I think that “Leviathan” is the good kind of film that has been made for the Western audience. I would say the film is ultimately not very Russian, but there is this nagging feeling of “Damn, this could happen anywhere”, and that makes it feel like a special kind of horror movie that haunts me till today.