The Ideological Content Analysis 30 Days Putsch:

30 Reviews in 30 Days

DAY SIX

Writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Leviathan tells the story of Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov), a rustic mechanic whose family property has been seized through eminent domain so that crooked town boss Vadim (Roman Madyanov) can use it to build a “palace”. Coming from Moscow to help Kolya is lawyer and old army buddy Dmitriy (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), who, in addition to offering counsel, also happens to be screwing his friend’s wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova) on the side. Dmitriy’s idea is to blackmail the mayor, but Vadim, prepared to use violence to have his way, proves to be more than a worthy adversary. Meanwhile, Kolya’s son Romka (Sergey Pokhodaev) bears a bitter grudge against stepmother Lilya, so that the household seems doomed to unhappiness even if the family home is saved. Leviathan is a somewhat exotic treat in its portrait of rural Russian life – an experience seldom offered to American filmgoers – but audiences accustomed to the breakneck pacing and flash of Hollywood might be frustrated by this import’s deliberate lurch and its unresolved ambiguity.

4.5 stars. Ideological Content Analysis indicates that Leviathan is:

5. Anti-police. Officers are assumed to be on the take.

4. Drug-ambivalent. Characters casually smoke and drink. Fellows come together in commiseration, celebration, or any occasion over vodka. It leads to poorly considered behavior, however, and Kolya warns his son against drinking beer with friends.

3. Anti-marriage. Matrimony, it would seem, makes Russian women miserable. Lilya is driven into another man’s arms, while her friend Anzhela (Anna Ukolova) fantasizes about leaving her husband and running away to America. Marriage, furthermore, shortens a woman’s lifespan. Stepanych (Sergey Bachurskiy), for instance, is said to have outlived two wives.

2. Anti-Christian. “I am a Christian, that’s my culture and my belief,” Zvyagintsev has said. His film, however, gives little evidence of this in its parallel characterization of a corrupt politician and an Orthodox priest. Religious platitudes are juxtaposed with slop being fed to swine.

1. Anti-Putin. Zvyagintsev has acknowledged that Leviathan was inspired by the story of a Colorado man, Marvin John Heemeyer. Not being informed of this fact, however, western media-brainwashed art house audiences are left to assume that Leviathan’s tale of a sleazy Christian bureaucrat’s oppression of an everyman is representative of Vladimir Putin’s theocratic heterofascist neo-Soviet Russia. A portrait of Putin hangs on the wall behind Vadim’s desk just to make the insinuation of microcosm explicit. In another scene, buddies peruse a collection of framed pictures of Soviet leaders they intend to use for target practice, with one of them suggesting that he would like to have a shot at the current crop of elected officials. The implication is an unflattering continuity between the dehumanization of the U.S.S.R. and Putin’s Russia.

With Zvyagintsev having made a name for himself with 2011’s Elena as a rising figure in international cinema, Russia’s Ministry of Culture put up more than a third of the money to make Leviathan; but Culture Minister Vladimir Medinsky was understandably scandalized by the finished product, incensed that Zvyagintsev would dare to “spit on” the Putin government with his “anti-Russian” film, which also had to be censored in its home country due to the profane screenplay. “An Incisive Take on Russia Even Putin Couldn’t Ignore,” proclaims a useful idiot writing for The Atlantic, further describing the film as “a rare example of a director’s prestige prevailing over a fiercely controlling propaganda machine.”

One hardly needs wonder why Leviathan was picked up for theatrical and home video distribution in the United States and so enthusiastically touted by Sony Pictures Classics (and, in Spain, by the aptly monikered Golem Distribucion). Sony Pictures Entertainment is headed by Michael Lynton, who, in addition to being a Jew, is a member of the Zio-globalist-warpigging Council on Foreign Relations. Sony Pictures Classics DVDs and Blu-ray discs have frequently paired the trailers for Leviathan and Red Army, another Sony product serving Zionist aims with regard to Russia, before the feature presentations.

Rainer Chlodwig von Kook

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