Driving 130km from Murmansk through the tundra into the town of Teriberka, where Andrei Zvyagintsev's Oscar-nominated film, Leviathan, was filmed, the visitor is enveloped in the desolation of snow and sky. A small blizzard here can strand a car for days, a polar night lasts 43 days, the wind is damp, and -20 Celsius feels twice as cold. The mists rising up off the Barents Sea, and the haunting, unforgiving beauty of the white slopes present themselves to residents and visitors as a test. But the decayed carcasses of boats on the shore, the abandoned apartment blocks, and the rotting wooden shacks suggest that many have given up.
Zvyagintsev's allegory
On the surface, it's easy to see why Leviathan raised such uproar in Russian officialdom. Zvyagintsev’s allegory of the biblical Job – a man who loses everything when he is tested by God – has the Russian state itself standing in for the Leviathan, in a nod to both the Bible and to Thomas Hobbes' treatise of 1651 on absolutist government. It's salt on a wound for a government that doesn't take criticism lightly.
Zvyagintsev's Leviathan tells the story of Nikolai, the resident of a fictional northern settlement who fights back unsuccessfully as a corrupt local mayor, backed by a priest, uses the courts to take away his family home. As it becomes clear that Nikolai cannot win, the film zeroes in on his unravelling life, the remains of which he drowns in vodka.
