If you remember nothing else about Andrei Zvyagintsev’s film “Leviathan”, the whale will remain with you.
In a squalid coastal town in Russia’s frigid north, a man gazes over the skeleton of a beached whale, the bones stark in their white purity. Although clearly suggesting death, the skeleton’s beauty and majesty stands in sharp contrast to the ugly trivialities of the town’s human population, lost in their obsessions with power and greed, in their corruption and hypocrisy. In the context of the film, it is hard not to see that “leviathan” as a symbol of the gigantic aspirations of the old Soviet Union, that other dead monster. Although the film-maker does not for a moment suggest that the former Soviet Union represented any kind of lost glory, “Leviathan” does portray a modern Russian society stumbling through a contemporary world utterly devoid of standards, morality, or hope. Most startling for a Western audience, that society now camouflages its vulgar graspings not in the language of Marxism-Leninism, but of Christianity.
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