By all accounts, I don’t think I will be able to see any other movies up for Best Foreign Film before the Academy Awards. Sad face.
I only had Ida before thanks to Netflix. Now I have Leviathan. And it won a Golden Globe, so it has something going for it.
That and a sweet sweet name. The country it comes from is okay.
Wanna know how I know this movie is Russian?
Leviathan is a story about land dispute. Because if anything, Russia doesn’t have enough land, causing the citizens to fight over it.
Kolya (Aleksey Serebryakov) is a down on his luck guy. He is good as a mechanic, his “Friends” in the community use him for favors, but it is too small of a town to really make a living there. But he has been there for a long time, has a sweet house with a lot of land on the coast.
His wife (Elena Lyadova) seems pretty distant, and his only child, a son from another woman (Sergey Pokhodaev) is kind of a dick and an average student.
But the mayor (Roman Madyanov) of the town is trying to take his land. Quite successfully! Using some legal loopholes, he is getting it for quick. Kolya is trying to fight it through the law, and through appeals, but he is losing over and over again. It seems like everyone is out to get Kolya and they all just want to use him.
And well, that is kind of true. Basically.
Also with Vladimir Vdovichenkov as a hot shot lawyer from Moscow coming to save his buddy.
Wanna know why I know this movie is called Leviathan?
(I actually have no idea.)
Leviathan is one of those movies that has a boring ass plot description, but one that ends up being far more interesting than it has any right to be.
Again, it is about a dude fighting a legal battle to just keep his home. But only kind of about that. It is about that and people treating him like shit and shit keep hitting him in the face. Literally!
No, not literally.
But still. A lot of fucked up things happen by the end, but even better is that it all makes sense by the end too. The plot points all wrap up! We aren’t left wondering anything! Yay complete films!
I mean. It has its boring. But it definitely tells a pretty good story while doing so. Glad it just wasn’t another super boring foreign film.