Leviathan · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

The verdict is read aloud in court at speed, in a flat administrative gabble, the way you'd read out a list of part numbers. The words go by too fast to follow. Nothing in the room pushes back. Kolya stands and listens to the sentence that takes his house, and it is finished before anyone could think of a reply.

Start there, because that voice is the film's real antagonist, and it never once raises itself.

Deleuze has a word for a piece of behaviour like that: the gest. Not a gesture that expresses what a character feels, but a posture or a bit of conduct that lays bare the arrangement the character is standing inside. The clerk isn't cruel. Reading fast is simply what the job sounds like. What comes through the voice is the shape of an order, and Zvyagintsev builds the rest of it spatially: officials seated behind desks under portraits and icons, the mayor working out of panelled rooms and taking counsel from an Orthodox bishop. Bodies placed so that power never has to argue. Other directors stage weather; this one stages hierarchy.

Now notice what he refused to film. The story's seed was Marvin Heemeyer, the Colorado man who in 2004 armoured a bulldozer, flattened the buildings of the town that had beaten him in a zoning fight, and killed himself. That is an action-image in Deleuze's sense — the sensory-motor circuit at full power, where a man perceives an intolerable situation and acts to change it, and the act settles the matter one way or the other. Nearly all cinema before 1945 runs on that circuit, and most cinema since is still selling it. Zvyagintsev transplants Heemeyer to the Barents coast and removes the bulldozer. Kolya has rage and vodka, and neither is a tool. This is the crisis of the action-image: a character who perceives perfectly well and can no longer produce a response that fits what he perceives. The film isn't slack. It is built so that every act available to Kolya is the wrong size for the thing in front of him.

So what is he up against, if not the mayor? Vadim is a grotesque, bloated and drunk, menacing one minute and craven the next, and he is also the smallest unit of the thing — the local face of an entire order. The force that takes the house is never in the frame, and it isn't waiting in the next room either. Deleuze separates two ways a shot can point past itself. The relative out-of-field is the space just outside the edge: the corridor, the car about to enter. The absolute out-of-field is a beyond that can't be located anywhere in space at all, a whole the frame opens onto without ever showing. Krichman's anamorphic 2.35:1 is built for precisely this. Figures sit small against grey water and low sky, and the widescreen doesn't so much reveal more world as make you feel how much of it is missing. The film is called Leviathan and not The Mayor for that reason.

Which brings you to the bones. The whale skeleton on the shore is the film's one unmissable object, and it does two jobs. As a symbol it condenses the whole organizing relation into something you can look at: the human remainder lying inside the ribs of something older and larger. But the shore isn't only symbolic. Deleuze keeps a category for films in which a concrete social setting turns out to be a crust over something more primitive. He calls the setting the derived milieu, and what shows through it the originary world — a place of raw appetite where everything runs downhill and nothing is redeemed. Stroheim and Buñuel are his cases. The provincial town is that crust; the beached hulls, the wet rock and the bones are what's underneath it, showing through.

Read the film that way and the drinking stops being local colour. Vodka here is a fetish in the strict sense, a part-object charged with compulsive force, and it does all the work: it makes friendship, it makes grief, it makes violence, and it makes the three interchangeable. What organizes the plot is not conflict but slope. Anna Mass cuts for accumulation rather than acceleration, holding the drinking scenes and the bureaucratic encounters long enough to become oppressive, and the effect is that you stop waiting for a reversal. The outcome feels fixed from the first frame. The film is showing you the route, not the result.

Inside that slope, Lilya is the watcher. Lyadova plays her almost entirely through silence and interiority, and Deleuze's name for such a figure is the voyant, the seer — someone who has stopped being an agent and become a register. When action drops out, what fills the frame is a pure optical situation: you look, because looking is what's left. The film extends the same discipline to its cruellest turns, withholding certain events outright and letting their consequences arrive sideways. That is inherited equipment. L'Avventura taught cinema that a plot could lose its centre and keep going, and taught it in compositions that dwarf people against rock and sea. Zvyagintsev takes both, the dwarfing and the withheld resolution, more or less whole.

There is no original score. Glass's Akhnaten bookends the film and the middle runs on wind, surf and garage noise. The Glass isn't underscoring anything — it was written for another work about another empire, and it arrives as its own finished thing laid alongside the coast. Deleuze calls this heautonomy: image and sound each standing as a complete whole, communicating only across the gap between them. The debt is to Mishima, where Glass's cycles gave one mortal life a mythic frame instead of an emotional commentary. Zvyagintsev repeats the move and aims it at a fishing town.

The rest of the grammar comes from further back. Andrei Rublev established that weathered stone and architecture could be held in takes long enough for duration itself to become a scene's moral weather; Stalker supplied the near-monochrome palette that treats degraded terrain as a metaphysical zone, and Krichman cools it further for the north. The church-and-state collusion comes out of Bergman and Dreyer — Winter Light for the priest as functionary of an emptied institution, Ordet for the planimetric long takes that set real faith against a bureaucratised one. Zvyagintsev's own addition is the rhyme between two churches: the intact one where the powerful worship, the half-ruined one where the derelicts gather to drink.

Those derelicts are worth staying with. Nothing in the film resembles a collective. No neighbours organise, no congregation objects, no public appears. Deleuze argued that modern political cinema begins exactly where the people are missing — where a filmmaker can no longer film a unified people acting in history and has to make the political out of that absence instead. Leviathan is what that looks like in a country with a working state and no working public. Its afterlife made the same point twice: financed by the Russian Ministry of Culture, then denounced by the culture minister, and released into the year the law banning obscenity in Russian films took effect, its ordinary swearing suddenly a licensing problem.

What did it do to film? It showed that the Tarkovskian landscape grammar, always reserved for the eternal, could carry a dated and checkable grievance without shrinking to the size of journalism. It took a single man's tragedy and closed every exit the form usually leaves open: no punishment for the wicked, no answer from the whirlwind, no bulldozer. And it put a Russian provincial tragedy on the world circuit at full auteur scale — the Cannes screenplay prize, a Golden Globe, an Oscar nomination lost to Ida.

The question it leaves open is Job's, which is why the priest quotes it. When the reply to a demand for justice is a description of a monster, has anything been answered? Watch it again with your ears. The state in this film never shouts. It is a voice reading quickly off a page, and past it, out the window, the water.