Leviafan (Leviathan)

Isolated in a small town in Northern Russia, a man fights to save his home from a corrupt mayor, relying on an oligarchically inclined legal system, and a lawyer skilled in the art of public sensation.

He's lived his whole life in the town.

Grew up there, became a family man, it's all he knows.

He has personality, responsibilities, a network.

Remote plutocratic politics.

A voice, legal rights, Andrey Zvyagintsev's take on contemporary Russia, Leviafan (Leviathan), like the skeleton of a massive destructive unstoppable procession, religion sans spirituality, futile to fight back, take the offer, drink, drink more, from one historical epoch to the next, take reprehensible thugs and give them wealth, prestige and power, hold them in place with the threat of imprisonment, they'll do as they're told, don't find a middle ground between what things were like before and after the 1917 revolution, recreate the system that lead to that revolution, bask in its imperialistic splendour, lock things down for a generation, flaunt your might, and see what Hobbes gets you.

Trust was placed where trust was deserved, its betrayal ripe with spontaneous idiocy, 10 blissful minutes for the bored, a maximum security sentence for the innocent.

Innocence requires innocence.

Angelic quid pro quo.

The act provides the mayor with leverage, a solid footing, authority.

Opulent construction.

In the gently falling snow.

Elena

As a barren particular is brought into the forefront, behind which rests a model representative of flight, stationary and passive, pensive and solitary, the image's distinction begins to slowly fade, before, after a fellow aviator arrives, it is subtly and universally interiorized.

What follows is an expertly executed yet modestly matriculated morphology, wherein each member of a seemingly content couple exercises their predetermined propensities to finance a younger generation.

Hypocrisy and deception abound.

Historical preference bifurcates.

Galvanized wit is rewarded.

And opportunity will not be displaced.

Andrey Zvyagintsev adopts sparse means to inculcate a breathtaking exemplar, which suggests that the film's form undeniably upholds Elena (Nadezhda Markina), although an internal cross-examination, mischievously interjected by its music, which preliminarily tricked me into believing Elena is simply a collusively cheeky quotidian parody of your traditional blockbuster, sustainably supports the case's other systemic suitor (original music by Philip Glass).

The imaginary factor is brilliantly lubricated by Elena Lyadova's (Katerina) provocative pirouette, volatile yet absorptive, as she self-indulgently tears up the runaway. 

Melancholic film.