Oscar-nominated Leviathan upsets officials in native Russia

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/16/leviathan-russian-reaction-oscars-golden-globes

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Leviathan may have been the first Russian film to win a Golden Globe since War and Peace in 1969, it may have been nominated for an Oscar and received five-star reviews in many western publications, but back in the motherland all this counts for little. The director, Andrei Zvyagintsev, is being given the cold shoulder due to his film’s uncompromising take on contemporary Russian society.

Made partly with money from Russia’s culture ministry and yet to be released in the country, the film has been criticised by the culture minister himself and widely denounced as anti-Russian. When it is released, due early next month, it will be in a sanitised form more in accordance with a new Russian law banning swearing in films.

The story of a family living in the far north of Russia, Leviathan portrays a man battling to save his home from demolition after a corrupt local bureaucrat sets his sights on expropriating the land for his own purposes. The satire of Russian authorities, the Orthodox church and the power structure in Russia is vicious and unrelenting, and even the victims are not particularly sympathetic characters, driven to drink, infidelities and anguished outbursts.

Unmoved by the film’s victory in the foreign language category at the Globes this month, the official reaction in Russia has been scathing. Vladimir Medinsky, the culture minister, told the Izvestia newspaper this week that Leviathan’s portrayal of the church was “beyond all limits” and said its characters were not real Russians.

“However much the authors made the characters swear and swig litres of vodka, they are not Russians. I did not recognise myself, my colleagues, friends or even friends of friends in Leviathan’s characters,” said Medinsky. He said he hoped Zvyaginstev would make films in future “without this existential despair”.

Late last year Zvyagintsev told the Guardian he believed Medinsky should be fired for his comment, when asked about state funding of films, that “all flowers should grow but we will only water the ones we like”.

Zvyagintsev’s films have never been rosy portrayals of familial and societal bliss, but his previous three feature films were deeply allegorical, playing out against backdrops that seemed removed from real geographical or temporal locations. Leviathan, while containing a universal message, is very different. There is even a portrait of Vladimir Putin hanging in the office of the film’s central villain, the corrupt, vodka-swilling mayor.

“The ideas at the heart of it are relevant everywhere,” Zvyagintsev told the Guardian. “But of course it’s a film about Russia. It’s a very Russian film … We live in a feudal system when everything is in the hands of one person, and everyone else is in a vertical of subordination.”

While Zvyagintsev has a history of making films with almost biblical plots and a deep vein of personal spirituality, his treatment of the organised Orthodox church is vicious, and the film has been given a very icy reception by its supporters.

“Leviathan is filthy libel against the Russian church and the Russian state,” wrote the Orthodox activist Kirill Frolov on his Facebook page, calling for the film to be banned in Russia. “I would stop worrying that we are supposedly restricting freedoms, we don’t need to justify ourselves. Leviathan is evil, and there is no place for evil in the cinema.”

The film was shown for two weeks last year at one St Petersburg cinema, to fulfil a requirement for it to be nominated for Russia’s Oscar entry. When it gets its wider release it will be edited according to the anti-swearing legislation, which Zvyagintsev called “a stupid, idiotic rule that has not been thought through”.

Some Russians have been watching pirated versions of the film online in order to see it in its original. The film’s producers say they will not take action against anyone who watches it illegally, but suggested viewers should make a charitable donation after doing so.

The head of the local administration in Teriberka, the village where much of the action was filmed, has said in interviews that she believes the film is an unfairly negative portrayal of life in the region, and has called for it not to be shown in Russian cinemas.

“The film didn’t make much of an impression on me, basically it says we are all alcoholics living in a dump,” Tatyana Trubilina told a local news agency. “I’m against showing it from an aesthetic point of view, and I really don’t know who would gain anything from seeing it.”

There have been rumours that authorities in Murmansk, the region’s capital, have ordered that the film should not be shown there. The regional administration has denied making any request, but a number of cinema chains confirmed to local news agencies that they would not be showing it.

Unidentified officials in Russia’s culture ministry told Interfax they were considering a ban on any films that “defame the national culture,” threaten the country’s unity or “undermine the foundations of constitutional order”.

In an interview with independent Russian station TV Rain, Zvyagintsev said no government figures had called him to congratulate him on his prize. There was also almost no discussion of the victory on state television, in stark contrast to the usual response to any Russian victory on the international stage. When the pop singer Dima Bilan won the Eurovision song contest in 2008, he was immediately phoned by the then president, Dmitry Medvedev, and feted across state media.

There seems little doubt that the lack of enthusiasm for Leviathan is down to its bleak, critical view of modern Russia. “This film is part of the new cold war the west is fighting against Russia,” wrote the pro-Kremlin political analyst Sergei Markov on Facebook. “This is an anti-Russian film basically made according to a western order, a cinematic anti-Putin manifesto. It’s a shame that talented people made it, but when talented people are on the side of evil, then people will be cold towards them. I think viewers will ignore this dark, hopeless stuff.”