Leviathan

Leviathan is a mythical, untameable beast in the bible, associated with the whale. It makes a particularly noted appearance in the Book of Job:

Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook? or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down?

It is a sort of warning, or metaphor, from God, to man's inclination for revenge or reproach to the divine will:

None is so fierce that dare stir him up: who then is able to stand before me?

Meaning: if the Leviathan is already too much for you, how do you imagine tackling me?

Meaning: if life, its sufferings, its injustice, its cruelty is too much for you, how do you imagine tackling me, who controls all of this, for a reason.

The Book of Job is a powerful text.

Andrey Zvyagintsev directed a Russian 2014 movie—Левиафан—which draws on the theme of complete loss and total surrender in the face of a power altogether more powerful than we are.

The artistic rendering is high, mixing tough societal realism with beautiful sceneries of northern Russian coast, including whales sightings. The soundtrack includes the Act I, Prelude: Refrain, Verse 1 & Verse 2 of Philip Glass's Akhnaten, which—as it opens the movie—fits the deluge that is coming.

This movie is a metaphorical introspection of the inner struggles of Job's relationship with calamities, fate and misfortune. It is all articulated around Лиля (Lilya), a beautiful woman who is the second wife of the older Kolya (the counterpart of Job in the movie). When Kolya gets into trouble, his friend, an able lawyer from Moscow, comes to help him in a fight against local corrupt officials. As a side theme, the movie delves into the provincial Russian society, in particular here the northernmost part by the sea, where desolation, collapsed infrastructures from the Soviet era, and heavy drinking are the quotidian. I don't know how accurate this is, but this represents a cliché of Russian society which might be accurate in remote areas of the country. At all rates, it fits perfectly the atmosphere of the movie. Only nature—the mighty leviathan included—is majestuous. All that is man-made is corrupt, ugly, decaying.

And even more to the point, more universally than post-Soviet stereotypes, is the betrayal of Лиля with the friend, in the shady hotel, where she joins him in his room full of guilt even ahead of the betrayal, after he himself retreated there with a veiled intention that she would or could follow him up. He, somehow, cowardly leaves it to her to provoke the whole situation. She does not even seem to desire it: there appears to be an ineluctable call to man's sin and defilement. Her internal struggle when she understands the option and resolves to abandon herself to wickedness is one of the most accurate scenes of the movie.

Their first act of adultery is when Kolya is in jail, adding to betrayal a lack of dignity and a retreat in shame and inequity. In the book of Job: «The eye also of the adulterer waiteth for the twilight, saying, No eye shall see me: and disguiseth his face.» But their fault is so big that they cannot even control their urges and get caught and reported by a child, at a picnic where everybody is nearby. We don't get to witness their intimacy then, this is left for Kolya and those around. The dialogue of the mother with the child is pitiable: «‒ You'll understand when you are bigger... ‒ But I want to understand now!»

As for the friend, he almost succeeded in holding up to the duties and glory of friendship, by providing enough support to win the case for Kolya and his family, but he will leave, letting them empty-handed. Job again: «My brethren have dealt deceitfully as a brook, and as the stream of brooks they pass away.»

Kolya is masterfully interpreted by an actor who can convey the pride, the resilience, the abnegation, the infinite capacity of the Russian soul to absorb sufferings and to scatter off tragedies with a glass of vodka, a look at the horizon and a whispered utterance in the Russian language. He is the resourceful mechanics who can fix everything, he is forgiving, he is witty—saying to the mayor who came to announce his intention to seize everything, «will you be able to stuff all that up into your arse?»—but he is also hot-tempered, being a man of feelings and values, that are trampled upon, and so easily gets into troubles. He is, more than a symbol of Job, a symbol of the common man. That makes his descent into hell even more so painful: one would not have particularly cared as the character, at the outset, doesn't attract immediate sympathy. Until we realize he is the symbol of humanity and gives his face to us all.

A final but notable theme is the role of the Church. Although strongly pivoting on a religious, indeed biblical theme (the Book of Job), the movie presents the church as an instrument or, more accurately, an auxiliary of corruption and wrongdoing. When the corrupt mayor is about to yield to the blackmail of Kolya's lawyer and to pay a huge amount of money for the property, he is comforted by the bishop that all power lies with God and that he should not be so meek himself and more trusting of the role and support he gets in God's plans. This cheers him up to give the lawyer a beating and stage a mock execution, which successfully sends him back to Moscow, allowing the mayor to seize the property at minimal costs. The destruction of the beautiful dacha of Kolya is heartbreaking. The fantastic view on the sea from the huge bay window—from which for sure one might have been able to spot the leviathan from the comfort of one's home—is ripped apart by a bulldozer. The movie concludes with a picture of what has been erected in its place: a church. It shows that, in matter of religion, the church should not replace man.

The leviathan is not identified. Most critics see it as the state. An official portrait of a young Putin in the officials' room is repeatedly shown to that intent.

In the Bible, Job gets rewarded for his faith. In the movie, Kolya is not. There is only perdition for him. Even Lilia's death looks like redemption, as her frail, fragile, tortured body is recovered in the rain, by the foot of the datcha. Previously, she was asking about God. One interpretation or the other, she is freed. Her torments are over.

In the Bible, God appears to Job as a hurricane. In the movie, the hurricane that indeed unleashes onto Kolya appears to be only this: a hurricane.