Andrey Zvyagintsev?s bleak Russian tragedy LEVIATHAN

LEVIATHAN (Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)

While the 2015 awards season is technically over, it often lingers on in the form of foreign films that were nominated, but don?t get released in my area until after the Oscars are long over. 

Such is the case with Andrey Zvyagintsev?s bleak Russian tragedy LEVIATHAN opening today at the Raleigh Grande, which lost the Best Foreign Picture Academy Award to Pawel Pawlikowski?s striking Polish drama IDA.

Set in the coastal town of Pribrezhnv, whose beaches are strewn with the bones of whale carcasses (Leviathan means ?whale? in Modern Hebrew), while old rotting whaling ships clutter the sea, seemingly always under a dreary, overcast sky.

The grizzled Alexei Serebriakov plays Kolya, a stubborn, thick-headed auto mechanic who is caught up in a land dispute with the local government headed by the boorish, corrupt Mayor Vadim Sergeyich (Roman Madyanov).

Kolya, his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova), and teenage son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev) are ordered to vacate the seaside property that's been in Koyla?s family for generations so he calls on the help of an ex-army friend Dmitri (Vladimir Vvitchenkov) who?s become a smooth, successful lawyer in Moscow.

Dimitri has compiled an incriminating file on the Mayor which he hopes will make him call off the eviction, but things get messy when Kolya is jailed for blowing up at the authorities and while he?s in the slammer, Dimitri sleeps with his wife.

The situation goes from horribly bad to wretchedly worse when Lilya commits suicide by jumping off a cliff into the ocean, and the police finger Koyla for her murder.

The story was inspired by the true story of Marvin Heemeyer, a Colorado man who made the news for fighting against the construction of concrete plant near his muffler shop, but, much like the Coen brothers? A SERIOUS MAN, it could very well be seen as a modern update of ?The Book of Job? ? an orthodox priest (Valeryi Grishko) even quotes from the scripture of Job to Koyla at one point.

As much as I admired the solid filmmaking framework of LEVIATHAN, I can?t say I?d really recommend it. I didn?t feel a connection to any of its characters who all appear to be vulgar, vodka-swigging caricatures, and the drawn-out length (141 minutes) is punishing at times. Maybe we?re supposed to feel like we?re being punished for enduring Koyla?s punishment.

Yet the film has instances of great effectiveness, especially visually (Mikhail Krichman?s cinematography stunningly captures the surrounding terrain), and it has considerable value as a vicious put-down of the Russian regime under Putin.

The exact opposite of a crowd pleaser (a crowd-downer?), LEVIATHAN is for folks who need no spoonful of sugar to help make their medicine go down. It?s just that the end results of this particular brand of meds rubbed me more wrong than right. 

More later...

WILD TALES: 6 Stories Viciously Satirizing Human Behavior

WILD TALES (Dir. Dami?n Szifr?n, 2014)

I loved IDA, and was glad it won the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, but I totally would've been cool if Argentina's selection, Dami?n Szifr?n's WILD TALES, opening today at an indie arthouse near me, had gotten the gold instead for 2014.

A prot?g? of Pedro Almod?var, who co-produced with his brother Agustin, Szifr?n has concocted an epic collection of six stories of bloody vengeance, that had me from the get go with an airplane-set pre-credits vignette.

In it, a couple of passengers, a model and a music critic, aboard a flight mid-air while flirting discover that they both knew a man by the name of Gabriel Pastemak. The model (Maria Marull) used to date Pastemak, but they broke up on bad terms; the critic (Dario Grandinetti) had ripped apart one of the Pastemak's classical compositions, which ended the guy's musical career.

A woman overhearing their conversation reveals that she was Pastemak?s elementary school teacher; another his former best friend. One by one, it turns out that everybody on the plane has a uneasy connection to Pastemak, and here?s the kicker: Pastemak is the pilot flying the plane.

The second story concerns a waitress (Julieta Zylberberg) at a roadside diner that recognizes a customer (Cesar Bordon) as being the crooked politician who ruined her family, and drove her father to suicide. The cook (Rita Cortese) suggests adding rat poison to his food, and Zylerberg is very tempted, but reluctant.

The third and most thrilling chapter depicts an extreme case of road rage with a premise that plays like a mini-version of DUEL. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays a slick corporate-type tooling across the countryside in his brand new sports car, who gets in a violent battle with a lower class workman (Walter Donado) in a beat-up old pick-up truck.

Next up, Ricardo Dar?n as an explosives expert in Buenos Aires who faces off against the city?s civic bureaucrats who keep towing his car. Dar?n, a superstar in Argentina best known here for his work in the 2009 Best Foreign Picture winner THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES, is superb as the beleaguered man who has reached his breaking point, FALLING DOWN-style.

Following that, Oscar Martinez portrays a rich man whose son is guilty of a hit and run accident that caused the death of a pregnant woman. Wanting to keep his son out of prison, Martinez and his lawyer (Osmar N??ez) plot to have his gardener (Germ?n de Silva) take the fall by claiming he was behind the wheel. This plan will be extremely expensive because Martinez will have to pay off his lawyer, the prosecutor, the cops, as well as the gardener to make it fly. Exasperated by these ?vultures,? as he calls them, Martinez loses patience with the negotiations, and that?s where I?ll leave this well played out premise.

The concluding and lengthiest episode, ?Until Death Do Us Part,? depicts a wedding reception that goes to hell and back again. The bride (?rica Rivas) finds out that her husband (Diego Gentile, who looks a bit Bradley Cooper-ish) had cheated on her with one of their guests, and, well, you know what they say about a woman scorned?

Each piece of this anthology film puzzle is viciously effective, as well as visually pleasing (kudos to cinematographer Javier Julia). It?s a sharp-witted, savage satire of human behavior, that while very dark, even allows for at least one feel-good ending in the batch (maybe two, but that?s debatable).

WILD TALES is in turns, exciting, wickedly funny, poetically powerful, and, yes, very wild indeed. I enjoyed all six tales individually immensely, maybe ?Little Bomb? the best, and really loved how they worked together both tonally and thematically. It may not have won the Oscar (it did sweep the Argentinian Academy Awards however), but it repeatedly won me over as it kept topping itself up until and including the very end.

More later...

Andrey Zvyagintsev?s bleak Russian tragedy LEVIATHAN

LEVIATHAN (Dir. Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2014)

While the 2015 awards season is technically over, it often lingers on in the form of foreign films that were nominated, but don?t get released in my area until after the Oscars are long over. 

Such is the case with Andrey Zvyagintsev?s bleak Russian tragedy LEVIATHAN opening today at the Raleigh Grande, which lost the Best Foreign Picture Academy Award to Pawel Pawlikowski?s striking Polish drama IDA.

Set in the coastal town of Pribrezhnv, whose beaches are strewn with the bones of whale carcasses (Leviathan means ?whale? in Modern Hebrew), while old rotting whaling ships clutter the sea, seemingly always under a dreary, overcast sky.

The grizzled Alexei Serebriakov plays Kolya, a stubborn, thick-headed auto mechanic who is caught up in a land dispute with the local government headed by the boorish, corrupt Mayor Vadim Sergeyich (Roman Madyanov).

Kolya, his second wife Lilya (Elena Lyadova), and teenage son Roma (Sergey Pokhodaev) are ordered to vacate the seaside property that's been in Koyla?s family for generations so he calls on the help of an ex-army friend Dmitri (Vladimir Vvitchenkov) who?s become a smooth, successful lawyer in Moscow.

Dimitri has compiled an incriminating file on the Mayor which he hopes will make him call off the eviction, but things get messy when Kolya is jailed for blowing up at the authorities and while he?s in the slammer, Dimitri sleeps with his wife.

The situation goes from horribly bad to wretchedly worse when Lilya commits suicide by jumping off a cliff into the ocean, and the police finger Koyla for her murder.

The story was inspired by the true story of Marvin Heemeyer, a Colorado man who made the news for fighting against the construction of concrete plant near his muffler shop, but, much like the Coen brothers? A SERIOUS MAN, it could very well be seen as a modern update of ?The Book of Job? ? an orthodox priest (Valeryi Grishko) even quotes from the scripture of Job to Koyla at one point.

As much as I admired the solid filmmaking framework of LEVIATHAN, I can?t say I?d really recommend it. I didn?t feel a connection to any of its characters who all appear to be vulgar, vodka-swigging caricatures, and the drawn-out length (141 minutes) is punishing at times. Maybe we?re supposed to feel like we?re being punished for enduring Koyla?s punishment.

Yet the film has instances of great effectiveness, especially visually (Mikhail Krichman?s cinematography stunningly captures the surrounding terrain), and it has considerable value as a vicious put-down of the Russian regime under Putin.

The exact opposite of a crowd pleaser (a crowd-downer?), LEVIATHAN is for folks who need no spoonful of sugar to help make their medicine go down. It?s just that the end results of this particular brand of meds rubbed me more wrong than right. 

More later...

WILD TALES: 6 Stories Viciously Satirizing Human Behavior

WILD TALES (Dir. Dami?n Szifr?n, 2014)

I loved IDA, and was glad it won the Best Foreign Picture Oscar, but I totally would've been cool if Argentina's selection, Dami?n Szifr?n's WILD TALES, opening today at an indie arthouse near me, had gotten the gold instead for 2014.

A prot?g? of Pedro Almod?var, who co-produced with his brother Agustin, Szifr?n has concocted an epic collection of six stories of bloody vengeance, that had me from the get go with an airplane-set pre-credits vignette.

In it, a couple of passengers, a model and a music critic, aboard a flight mid-air while flirting discover that they both knew a man by the name of Gabriel Pastemak. The model (Maria Marull) used to date Pastemak, but they broke up on bad terms; the critic (Dario Grandinetti) had ripped apart one of the Pastemak's classical compositions, which ended the guy's musical career.

A woman overhearing their conversation reveals that she was Pastemak?s elementary school teacher; another his former best friend. One by one, it turns out that everybody on the plane has a uneasy connection to Pastemak, and here?s the kicker: Pastemak is the pilot flying the plane.

The second story concerns a waitress (Julieta Zylberberg) at a roadside diner that recognizes a customer (Cesar Bordon) as being the crooked politician who ruined her family, and drove her father to suicide. The cook (Rita Cortese) suggests adding rat poison to his food, and Zylerberg is very tempted, but reluctant.

The third and most thrilling chapter depicts an extreme case of road rage with a premise that plays like a mini-version of DUEL. Leonardo Sbaraglia plays a slick corporate-type tooling across the countryside in his brand new sports car, who gets in a violent battle with a lower class workman (Walter Donado) in a beat-up old pick-up truck.

Next up, Ricardo Dar?n as an explosives expert in Buenos Aires who faces off against the city?s civic bureaucrats who keep towing his car. Dar?n, a superstar in Argentina best known here for his work in the 2009 Best Foreign Picture winner THE SECRET IN THEIR EYES, is superb as the beleaguered man who has reached his breaking point, FALLING DOWN-style.

Following that, Oscar Martinez portrays a rich man whose son is guilty of a hit and run accident that caused the death of a pregnant woman. Wanting to keep his son out of prison, Martinez and his lawyer (Osmar N??ez) plot to have his gardener (Germ?n de Silva) take the fall by claiming he was behind the wheel. This plan will be extremely expensive because Martinez will have to pay off his lawyer, the prosecutor, the cops, as well as the gardener to make it fly. Exasperated by these ?vultures,? as he calls them, Martinez loses patience with the negotiations, and that?s where I?ll leave this well played out premise.

The concluding and lengthiest episode, ?Until Death Do Us Part,? depicts a wedding reception that goes to hell and back again. The bride (?rica Rivas) finds out that her husband (Diego Gentile, who looks a bit Bradley Cooper-ish) had cheated on her with one of their guests, and, well, you know what they say about a woman scorned?

Each piece of this anthology film puzzle is viciously effective, as well as visually pleasing (kudos to cinematographer Javier Julia). It?s a sharp-witted, savage satire of human behavior, that while very dark, even allows for at least one feel-good ending in the batch (maybe two, but that?s debatable).

WILD TALES is in turns, exciting, wickedly funny, poetically powerful, and, yes, very wild indeed. I enjoyed all six tales individually immensely, maybe ?Little Bomb? the best, and really loved how they worked together both tonally and thematically. It may not have won the Oscar (it did sweep the Argentinian Academy Awards however), but it repeatedly won me over as it kept topping itself up until and including the very end.

More later...