Andrey Zvyagintsev: To Kill the Minotaur. First impressions after the festival screening in Cannes

To describe the plot of the movie a Russian proverb – “trouble does not come alone” will do. Gleb is a successful businessman who owns a city-forming enterprise in a provincial Russian town, which was filmed in Riga. He lives in an expensive lakeside country villa with his wife Galina and son. In the fall of 2022, the businessman faces anxiety, uncertainty and problems. His wife behaves coldly and aloofly, his son is bullied at school, and as director of the company, the mayor’s office requires him to make a decision – which of them will go “to SWO” under the city quota, which was lowered from above immediately after the announcement of partial mobilization. Even a symbolic figure of 14 people has been set. One can only guess whether the director has a sacred hint for 2014.

Meanwhile, the consequences of mobilization are already being discussed in the office smoking room while watching the news on Dozhd, which shows people fleeing Russia spending days in traffic jams on the border with Georgia, at the famous Upper Lars checkpoint. All of this threatens to stop production and lose valuable personnel, the very brain drain. The fact that Gleb’s family has a growing son adds a special angle to the narrative of this drama.

The collapse of the former ideal life is inevitable, so one has to make a moral choice, no matter how much one wants to. Especially since it was not customary to do so before. In general, this tangle of problems and psychological contradictions forms a cinematic labyrinth of the Minotaur, personifying the confusion of life. The monster takes sons, wives and the meaning of life. But is everyone ready for it? In this case, the Minotaur meets Leviathan to finally enslave human souls.

In the closing credits, we learn that Andrey Zvyagintsev’s new movie is inspired by Claude Chabrol’s legendary film The Unfaithful Wife. And indeed, many of the plot lines about infidelity Andrei Zvyagintsev reproduces, sometimes even quoting and with meticulous accuracy. Galina really enjoys escaping in the mornings from the family estate to a typical apartment in a city panel, where the fashionable and progressive photographer Anton lives. Husband Gleb notices the infidelity and starts his surveillance, after which the action is not on a joke twist. In general, at first you watch this movie as a typical melodrama, not coincidentally, the performer of the main role Dmitry Mazurov used to be known more and more for Russian TV series and popular genre pictures. But all this is a deception, which I think the director deliberately allows in order to initially confuse the impressionable viewer, who will later be confronted again with biblical meanings and the unbearability of existence. The candid Polaroid shots of the affair only serve to lighten the atmosphere and emphasize the intrigue.

Of course, “Minotaur” is very different from that French picture, while taking from it the necessary element of coldness, uncertainty and, again, anxiety and danger in the air. After all, it too was not just a movie about female infidelity, but a rather curious statement about the modest revulsion of bourgeois life, in which aggression and conflict are hidden beneath outward prosperity. It is this optic that falls within Andrey Zvyagintsev’s area of interest.

Unspokenness, silence, inhibitedness and something hidden – everything, just like in Michael Haneke’s, is the true defining motive of his characters. Ever since the triumph of “The Return” in Venice, the inner feelings of a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown have been much more important to director Zvyagintsev than political messages and allusions. But the central theme is not “who sleeps with whom”, but what happens inside a man who faces suspicion and humiliation. Moral choices, his quiet resistance, the preservation of humanity in all circumstances – we saw this in both “Elena” and “Unlove”, but in “Minotaur” it is highlighted somehow especially brightly. Tension is bound to build up and eventually turn into irreparable tragedy, but this is necessary to achieve catharsis.

It seems that in this labyrinth everyone is forced to make a choice at every step. The entrepreneur Gleb himself is genuinely tormented by the need to send his employees to certain death, so he postpones the decision until the end and finally makes an important and symbolic act, which is unacceptable to write about in a review. The head of the personnel department in, as always, talented and this time unusually harsh performance of Varvara Shmykova as if fulfills the role of a moral tuning fork and becomes the very person between the employee and the system. The friends of the protagonists also represent different models of human behavior in crisis conditions. Extremely symptomatic is the scene in a typically expensive Russian restaurant, which reveals modern models of behavior in given circumstances. Anatoly Beloy’s character is deliberately cynical and rude, while Artur Smolyaninov decides to sit it out in Bali and washes his hands, while telling vulgar jokes. In general, in the vulgarity of being Zvyagintsev also knows very well, so he manages to convey it all perfectly. Remembered and episodic role of a young actress Stasya Tolstoy, whose response to the challenges of the time were just breasts, exposed for all to see. And the son of the main characters must choose how to respond to the bullying of a classmate – aggression or ignoring. Finally, the spouse, played very tenderly and again coldly by Iris Lebedeva, also better known earlier for folk movies, will have to decide how to live on and what to do from longing and suffering.

However, the main conflict in the lives of the main characters is lived inside. Mobilization in the country, posters calling for a contract with the Russian Army, the letters Z on cars, inscriptions “Fuck the war” and people with severed limbs in the streets – all this is just the necessary background to convey the existential fear and panic that has gone out of control. In “Minotaur” we don’t see any fighting, no one is protesting, but the camera lingers on the signs of wartime, without which a modern Russian city cannot be imagined. But Zvyagintsev’s war is a setting, a litmus test to reveal in maximum detail the behavior of a driven and confused man. It is an empty space filled with such symbols. And in reality we see another parable of biblical scope, where everyone must kill his inner Minotaur. But not everyone succeeds, because the labyrinth is too confusing and deceptive, and the monster keeps eating its victims.

In the film we do not see the hero Theseus, who voluntarily went into the labyrinth, that is, into the scorcher and to the slaughter, to fight the Minotaur openly, but we do see moments of personal and private humanism, compassion and empathy, which do break through even through the gray lifeless space created by the director with the help of the magnetic music of the composers of the Halperin brothers. In the same way, the space for an oasis is created in the desert. Therefore, the protagonist is tormented by his conscience, and the wife is forced to sympathize with the floundering husband, despite the obvious deadlock and hopelessness of the situation. Andrey Zvyagintsev in “Minotaur” creates another fresco, which clearly traces the main Christian plot – the Pietà. That is, the director allocates space for the possibility of human suffering and compassion even in the silent tragedy and the final collapse of all the meanings of life.

Whether the heroes will manage to escape from this labyrinth – you will learn from the movie, and, perhaps, from your own life, because Zvyagintsev speaks to each of us in an understandable language and about familiar circumstances. While watching this movie I had to experience more than once a personal catharsis, that suggestion of feelings that happened to me during these four years. And that’s what Zvyagintsev’s talent is all about.

And the talent of the competition program selectors lies in the fact that they combined together two of the most important films of the year – “Fatherland” by Pavel Pawlikowski about Thomas Mann’s return to Germany after World War II and “Minotaur” by Andrey Zvyagintsev. In fact, two of our brilliant contemporaries have made extremely consonant films about a global tragedy, which resonates in each of us with personal mental anxiety, confusion and chilling horror. The private fall becomes part of the general. And vice versa. The individual does not exist in isolation from society, and the aggression and violence in the air is bound to reverberate through everyone. And hiding in the corners of the labyrinth is hardly possible. There seems to be no way out. But still everyone will find their own way out of this inner surrender, the main thing is to keep something human. In the given circumstances. Such a challenge is offered to us in this monumental work by a director who himself was on the verge of personal tragedy after leaving the country and falling ill. But he made the movie and killed his Minotaur.