Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev despatched shock waves by means of the Cannes Film Festival with a soberly damning crime movie about homicide and corruption in Russia, set towards the conscription of younger males into President Vladimir Putin’s battle with Ukraine.
“Minotaur,” which debuted Tuesday evening on the French pageant, was one of the anticipated picks at this 12 months’s Cannes. The movie rewarded these expectations, receiving one of many pageant’s most enthusiastic responses and placing the Russian filmmaker squarely within the combine for the Palme d’Or.
While “Minotaur” is outwardly centered round a married couple, its story has apparent political reverberations. Dmitriy Mazurov performs the chief govt of a giant transport firm who, as Russia’s navy mobilizes for the all-out invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is requested to contribute a quota of 150 employees to the mounting battle effort.
At the identical time, Mazurov begins investigating the suspected infidelity of his spouse, performed by Iris Lebedeva. As “Minotaur” evolves, their household drama takes on darker symbolism for the deceptions and savagery of Putin’s battle.
“It was important for me to make this film given the current Russian context,” Zvyagintsev informed reporters on Wednesday. “It was a perfect pretext to say some important things.”
For Zvyagintsev, it was a long-in-coming triumph. His earlier two movies — “Leviathan” (2014) and “Loveless” (2017) — had been each critically acclaimed Oscar nominees. But in the course of the pandemic, sickness pressured Zvyagintsev into an induced coma for 40 days. Recovering in a German clinic, he needed to relearn how one can stroll and maintain utensils. A 12 months later, in 2022 and nonetheless in a wheelchair, he moved his household to Paris.
“It’s one of the greatest things that’s happened to me over these last nine years,” Zvyagintsev mentioned of returning to Cannes, the place his earlier two movies debuted. “Coming back after such a lengthy absence to the Cannes Film Festival is an absolutely incomparable event.”
Zvyagintsev had beforehand labored in Russia, and whereas his movies resisted overt political assertion, their critiques of Putin’s authorities weren’t exhausting to deduce. Russia’s Cultural Ministry, which had partly funded “Leviathan,” was extremely essential of the film, saying it “openly spit on” the federal government.
“Minotaur” is the primary movie made by Zvyagintsev outdoors Russia. He shot it in Latvia.
“I perhaps lost a link when I left Russia six years ago, but I know what I’m talking about,” he mentioned. “I know how the people think, how they react, how they go about things. I know a lot about corruption, too, which has developed in the country.”
While Zvyagintsev did not make many direct statements about Russia on Wednesday, he defined how he sees politics filtering into his filmmaking.
“I didn’t want to make the most of the politics because that would discredit what you hear,” the director mentioned. “It was better to indulge in silence and rely on gestures.”
The broad outlines of “Minotaur” had been impressed by Claude Chabrol’s 1969 movie “The Unfaithful Wife.” Zvyagintsev first started engaged on it years in the past. But after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine transpired throughout his restoration, the movie started to shift. As in his earlier films, geopolitics seeped right into a household drama.
“There’s nothing more interesting than studying a couple,” he mentioned. “Each member of a couple have to make choice, choices which call the relationship in the family into question. A family is like a battlefield.”
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