Leviathan

Why you get a mediocre movie awards?

The awards harvested by the film are incredible Leviathan: nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars and BAFTA four nominations at the European Film Awards, including Best Picture award at the Cannes Film Festival Best Screenplay (I repeat: "best Screenplay") award for best Cinematography at the Seville Festival, nominated for Best Foreign Film at the Independent Spirit Awards and the Satellite Awards, among the best films of the year list National Board of Review and, finally, the payroll Critics Choice Awards as best foreign language film. And yet ... it is a mediocre film in which the worst is the script.

Poor performance can jeopardize a great script, but a mediocre script will always result in a bad movie, despite the interpretive qualities of his players box. The script is the most important of a film. Unscripted nothing that could resemble a product of "cinema". Perhaps a bad joke or a cinematic abortion, never a worthy film. And Leviathan the script fails from the outset and becomes disjointed in the second half of the tape.

It is no longer a question of the character traits are painted superficially, but that many of the themes of the film remain as loose ends, as the film progresses towards its resolution. Characters who seem protagonists in the first part (the lawyer or the same protagonist child marriage) disappear simply in the second half. Many twists are completely inconsistent and the same scenarios in which the plot unfolds, despite receiving a nomination no matter what international award, are equally mediocre, lacking in grandeur and even something that deserves a grade above vulgarity.

What did he say director Andrei Zvyagintsev us? Russia is a corrupt country where any mob of three to the room, protected by a public office and blessed by the bishop of the local Orthodox Church, and with the acquiescence of the justice system and police, can do whatever he They wants ... For that trip did not lack saddlebags. After all the plot is a simple property mobbing as we see day after day in Barcelona, ​​without so many complicities or complications. I doubt that the circumstances Andrei Zvyagintsev account in his film are given. For mobbing, which have to suffer the inhabitants of Barcelona (Spain), abandoned by the City Council. A real estate that acquired their flats and tourism accommodate the worst imaginable to force the rest of their neighbors to accept bids at low prices. Needless to imagine anything in Russia, as in this our swindled Spain, without so many complicities or real or supposed mafia networks, a property can do, more or less, what we see in Leviathan.

The film has been accused Russia of not giving a true picture of the country. I believe it. Some people want to give a pre-Soviet vision of the country's reality, here and now. There are terminals communist times where you could tell that inevitably sank and everyone did assert their interests in the most dramatic way possible. Nor are the days when Boris Yeltsin came to power with a bottle of cheap vodka under his arm and the blessing of the US State Department. In the film we are in 2014. The oligarchs are imprisoned, exiled or praying that no one will remember them. Russia, the feeling you have regained confidence in itself. And his strength as a state.

This film would have us believe that the holy alliance between politics, justice, police and religion, are able to join forces to exercise real estate mobbing. It's a movie, not a documentary. Louis Buñuel and misrepresented some scenes in his docudrama about Las Hurdes (the goat did not fall, the shot; the donkey tour of ants was an obsession that the director shared with Lorca and Dalí) and as false as the funeral scene. With Leviathan happens much: as we leave the film in honest mediocrity; as a complaint is nothing more than a bad joke.

The film is Russian bill, but has not been made to be screened in Russia (too close to that would be credible), but to give a tarnished image of the country abroad. Even the title has been used to draw attention, not Russian, but the Western. Leviathan is especially remembered in the US as a novel by Paul Auster, fashion writer in the country. Much of the American public, including the Oscar jury believed, visionary it before, it was simply an adaptation of the story of Auster. Obviously a deliberate ambiguity.

Another element which confirms that there is "Russian cinema" is that no reflections and certain intellectual level as themselves, not only film but literature, theater, even Russian music. The film is flat. It meant that, despotism and injustice are the heritage of Russia as always: they existed under the tsars, existed with Stalin, did not disappear with the "perestroika" and "glasnost" and reappeared in all its brutality with the pirate who is Vladimir Putin ... The proof that this is false is given by the fact that the film was shot in Russia and became eligible for government grants. If there is anything left of dictatorship in that country, the director right now would be in a common grave.

If you have not received awards in his homeland it is because there is hardly digestible a story like this, as Zvyagintsev has told. Conversely, if the US media and Hollywood distributors have embraced with such benevolence is precisely due to its deliberate intention to undermine the image of the Russian state. Or does anyone believe that the "Star Wars" and the deployment of missiles and military bases are the only resource used by the US to corner Russia? This film, mediocre and poorly tied as they come, is part of the arsenal of psychological operations that tends to show the West that Russia is a virus that must be prevented.

The 140-minute film made eternal from the first hour; It not even clears what happened to the wife of the protagonist: murdered? ¿Suicided ?, much less with the combative lawyer who is his lover and that despite propose flee with him to Moscow, disappears without a mention in the second half. The secondary characters, including child marriage, fade to fade completely. When the credits roll and the projection ends, you wake up with the feeling that the punishment is over and that critics who have glossed as "Bergman inspiration", "a product worthy heir of Tarkovsky", "sympathetic film and biting "or" cinema truth "or not have seen, or is that mercenaries have gained by writing a favorable review.

As mentioned, the film is financed by the Russian state. Once the censorship imposed only where swear words are changed. The director chose to eliminate such words without change, so that the lips of the actors move but the tacos are heard. That was all the "censorship". The Western press has boasted that the "full" version (ie with plugs loudly) circulates from hand to hand especially among young people. I do not think that any Russian hear something tacos, frankly, but the truth is that the film has sparked some controversy in the country. Vladimir Medinski, Minister of Culture accused the director of search only "the golden statuettes and red carpets" and to present a distorted image of Russia that fit perfectly with the design of this country by European and US authorities. In the city of Samara, political and religious representatives called for the dismissal Valeri Grishko, director of the local theater who played the role of the Orthodox bishop in the movie.

Not only is there a film that deserves no award, supremely bored but the brave who dare to pay for her. Some should remember that the Cold War ended in 1989.

Another element which confirms that there is "Russian cinema" is that no reflections and certain intellectual level as themselves, not only film but literature, theater, even Russian music. The film is flat. It meant that, despotism and injustice are the heritage of Russia as always: they existed under the tsars, existed with Stalin, did not disappear with the "perestroika" and "glasnost" and reappeared in all its brutality with the pirate who is Vladimir Putin ... The proof that this is false is given by the fact that the film was shot in Russia and became eligible for government grants. If there is anything left of dictatorship in that country, the director right now would be in a common grave.

If you have not received awards in his homeland it is because there is hardly digestible a story like this, as Zvyagintsev has told. Conversely, if the US media and Hollywood distributors have embraced with such benevolence is precisely due to its deliberate intention to undermine the image of the Russian state. Or does anyone believe that the "Star Wars" and the deployment of missiles and military bases are the only resource used by the US to corner Russia? This film, mediocre and poorly tied as they come, is part of the arsenal of psychological operations that tends to show the West that Russia is a virus that must be prevented.

The 140-minute film made eternal from the first hour; It not even clears what happened to the wife of the protagonist: murdered? ¿Suicided ?, much less with the combative lawyer who is his lover and that despite propose flee with him to Moscow, disappears without a mention in the second half. The secondary characters, including child marriage, fade to fade completely. When the credits roll and the projection ends, you wake up with the feeling that the punishment is over and that critics who have glossed as "Bergman inspiration", "a product worthy heir of Tarkovsky", "sympathetic film and biting "or" cinema truth "or not have seen, or is that mercenaries have gained by writing a favorable review.

As mentioned, the film is financed by the Russian state. Once the censorship imposed only where swear words are changed. The director chose to eliminate such words without change, so that the lips of the actors move but the tacos are heard. That was all the "censorship". The Western press has boasted that the "full" version (ie with plugs loudly) circulates from hand to hand especially among young people. I do not think that any Russian hear something tacos, frankly, but the truth is that the film has sparked some controversy in the country. Vladimir Medinski, Minister of Culture accused the director of search only "the golden statuettes and red carpets" and to present a distorted image of Russia that fit perfectly with the design of this country by European and US authorities. In the city of Samara, political and religious representatives called for the dismissal Valeri Grishko, director of the local theater who played the role of the Orthodox bishop in the movie.

Not only is there a film that deserves no award, supremely bored but the brave who dare to pay for her. Some should remember that the Cold War ended in 1989.