COMPETITION – Leviathan, metaphor of the Biblical monster

In 2011, Andrey Zvyagintsev won the Special Jury Prize in Un Certain Regard with Elena. In 2007, his film The Banishment, presented in Competition, won the Best Actor Award for lead actor Konstantin Lavronenko. The Russian director is back in the Selection this year with Leviathan, the portrait of a tragic hero who is tortured by his fears.

Photo from the film Leviathan © RR

A Biblical monster. Dragon, serpent and crocodile all at once, the terrifying beast is the portent of a horrible cataclysm. Andrey Zvyagintsev uses this apocalyptic metaphor to evoke the anxieties of a man who is in desperate need and uncertainty, haunted by his fears and terrified of the future. The film is mainly inspired by the famous book by philosopher Thomas Hobbes, a political reflection on the relationship between the individual and the State, studied in most philosophy classrooms. “The philosophical perspective that Thomas Hobbes adopts on the State is that the individual enters into a pact with the devil: he sees the State as a monster that man has created to avoid the all-out war of man against man, and to fulfill the individual’s understandable desire to acquire safety in exchange for freedom, his only true asset.”

With this fourth film and its philosophical accents, the story of a man living with his wife and child and threatened with expropriation, the Russian director remains firmly in the social, human and often provocative vein already explored in his two previous feature films, Elena and The Banishment. Well known for his aesthetic and minutely perfected shots, and for his obsession with the mythological dimension of existence, the former TV cameraman’s work is reminiscent of the universe of Andreï Tarkovski, with powerful images that evoke the question of the passing of time. “An adaptation of the story of Job into modern Russia“, to quote Thierry Frémaux.

Charlotte Pavard

SCREENINGS

Friday 23 May / Grand Théâtre Lumière / 11:30 a.m. – 10 p.m.

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