Recently, I watched Andrey Zvyagintsev’s first film The Return, in preparation to watch his latest at NYFF. I remember being impressed with Leviathan, although hadn’t seen it since it came out in 2014, which served as something of the height of the neo-neorealism that had become endemic to the European arthouse cinema of the 2000s and 2010s, with Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep taking home the Palme that same year. These types of films—with their naturalist aesthetics and considered approach to narrative—are often wrongly conflated with the “slow cinema” works emerging at the same time. But compared to contemporaries with more stalwart approaches to the image (Alonso, Serra, Weerasethakul), Zvyagintsev and his ilk are only slow when compared to the rhythms of mainstream cinema; they don’t reach for some new way of experiencing time, they merely place an emphasis on the unfolding. It is more akin to Antonioni and Bresson than, say, Angelopoulos or Tarkovsky’s post-Mirror mature works.
Zyvagintsev’s dour sense of movement matches his dour sense of the world. His films are notorious for being “bleak” and I’d describe his form as “self-serious.” That wouldn’t be fair to Zvyagintsev, though, given that the acerbic seriousness with which he approaches his subject matter is justified: if he’s one thing, it’s a chronicler of the slippage of Russian society into ruin. By his arrival in the international festival circuit in 2003, the disastrous collapse of the Soviet Union and the brief experiment with liberalism before Yeltsin’s coup in 1993 all seemed like a memory from a bygone country that used to have hope. It doesn’t exist in Zvyagintsev’s world.
In The Return, Zvyagintsev grapples with the implications of a nation that has nothing left but authority. He opens with a stunning sequence of boys challenging each other to jump off a guard tower and into the cold water below the jetty. Even after his older brother jumps, Vanya (Ivan Dobronravov) isn’t able to bring himself to do it, but he’s caught in a bind as the boys will call him a coward if he climbs down. Shriveling, practically naked, Vanya stays huddled on the tower until nearly all the light in the sky has gone, and his mother arrives to rescue him. This opening section of the film could serve as its own short, but instead leaves it as prelude for a work about fathers and sons, as Ivan and Andrei (Volodia Garin) are reunited with their long-gone father (Konstantin Lavronenko), who’s never referred to by anything but his role to these boys. The father is harsh, drunk, and hypermasculine, trying to instill discipline on his boys through demands and punishments. It, naturally, leads to a combustive conclusion, one which can be read as a metaphor for the generational woes and societal quagmires that Russians found themselves in in the early-2000s. The Return, like so much of neo-neorealism, is a reflective and analytic work under the guise of a poetic one.
That’s not to denigrate the craft on display, or the poetics of individual images or sequences, but Zvyagintsev—in his emphasis on narrative—often fails to be evocative in the way so many works of poetry reach towards. Take his countryman Tarkovsky, for instance: Tarkovsky’s films, they grew and became more consolidated form, in search of something, philosophical or spiritual. The scene in Nostalghia where Gorchakov (Oleg Yankovsky) tries to cross the entire basin of the pool with a lit candle, with the camera tracking alongside him as he keeps his hand over the flame, is cinema as participatory in religious exercise. Here, the audience does something along with the character; we share in the project.
Zvyagintsev’s films, meanwhile, seek to inform and—perhaps contradicting his ostensibly anti-authoritarian views—do so by imposition of information. In his new film Minotaur (a reworking of Claude Chabrol's 1969 film La Femme infidèle), this manifests as Zvyagintsev using the structure of a thriller to mask his didacticism about the corruption of Russian society in the wake of Putin’s catastrophic and cruel invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In this milieu, Zvyagintsev reveals a system built around protecting those already in power.
One of these systems is the means of drafting soldiers for the country’s partial mobilization. The mayor meets with the top business owners in town to tell them they need to assist in filling draft quotas, with the largest businessmen needing to come up with 25 names and the more modest ones having to pull a dozen from their work force. If they don’t provide enough names, the draft officers will pull people without regard for who’s-who. Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) doesn’t want to effect his staffing, so decides to hire 12 people that he’ll pretend to train before sending them straight to the war. As the plot develops and one of the only people who can piece together the crime he commits at the center of the film is his head of security, Gleb moves him to the draft list.
As a political film, Minotaur is surprisingly contained. The film’s critiques never move beyond the obvious corruption within Russian state and business affairs; it’d be reductive to say that it’s merely set dressing—Zvyagintsev, an artist in exile, is very passionate about these issues—but it’s never particularly profound. The moments that are—like a remarkably strange and haunting tracking shot in the wife’s lover’s apartment, or the film’s extraordinary ending—achieve their profundity through ambiguity. These moments are beguiling in their formal separation from the rest of the film, while simultaneously serving as a way for the audience to sit back and think for themselves about the work.
These moments also take on more power by their juxtaposition against otherwise middling drama, which takes place in a world textured like real life but so obviously is staged. (I will admit, until the draft became part of the plot, I thought the film was about Russians living in Riga, and Zvyagintsev’s ardent naturalism comes to blows with how distinct Latvia looks—at least, to people familiar with the specificities of former SSRs.) The artifice of Riga-as-Russia isn’t able to overcome the film’s realism, instead turning it into a kind of in-between place—at once Latvia, at once Russia; at once the world today, at once completely antiquated. Perhaps that tension’s intentional in Zvyagintsev’s work; after all, this is a film where mayors evoke civic duty towards the nation in a way that feels Soviet (which itself is a holdover from the pioneering culture of the eastward-expanding Russian Empire), yet exists in the absence of any purpose beyond itself. That’s the contradiction at the heart of modern Russia, that in the absence of either a frontiersman spirit or a Five-Year Plan, the systems that drove those endeavors now just spin their wheels over nothing but made-up goals in service of a self-perpetuating nationalism. If the purpose of Zvyagintsev’s films are to make me think about that, then they’re successful, although I can’t but help feel like I’m filling in the room left in the margins because the director doesn’t want to fill them in himself, instead choosing to focus on his self-serving bleak atmosphere.