'Minotaur' Review: Andrey Zvyagintsev's Riveting Chabrol Remake
'Minotaur'
Cannes Film Festival
-
Share on Facebook
-
Share on X
-
Google Preferred
-
Share to Flipboard
-
Show additional share options
-
Share on LinkedIn
-
Share on Pinterest
-
Share on Reddit
-
Share on Tumblr
-
Share on Whats App
-
Send an Email
-
Print the Article
-
Post a Comment
Minotaur may allude to a Greek myth, be loosely based on a film by Claude Chabrol (The Unfaithful Wife), and represent the first work director Andrey Zvyagintsev (The Return, Leviathan) has made entirely outside Russia. (Shot in Latvia, it is officially a French-German-Latvia co-production.) But it’s about as Russian as a film could be. It’s as Russian as horseradish vodka, forest steppe marmots, and the word toska, a Russian term that connotes a profound melancholy whose many shades Vladimir Nabokov said could not be captured in English, but which range from “great spiritual anguish” to “physical or metaphysical dissatisfaction, a sense of longing, a dull anguish, a preying misery, a gnawing mental ache.”
Related Stories
Movies
'Her Private Hell' Review: Sophie Thatcher and Charles Melton in Danish Bad Boy Nicolas Winding Refn's Agonizingly Self-Indulgent Return to Filmmaking
Movies
The Filmmakers at Cannes Who Are Learning to Love AI
This rigorously well-made, grippy-as-a-live-squid, toska-steeped work is Zvyagintsev’s most openly critical commentary on the motherland’s current political, spiritual and moral malaise, a denunciation never said in so many words but expressed with intricate layers of irony.
Minotaur
The Bottom Line
An immaculate exercise in irony and indirection.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Dmitriy Mazurov, Iris Lebedeva, Boris Kudrin, Yuriy Zavalnyouk, Varvara Zmykova, Vladimir Friedman, Elena Bogdanovich-Golubeva, Mikhail Samodakhov, Anatoliy Weissmann, Artur Smolyaninov, Kristina Zakharova, Stacy Tolstoy, Anastasia Mishenko, ArtIgoris Abramavičius, Artjoms Garejevs, Mikhail Safronov, Dmitrijs Punte, Volodymyr Gorislavets, Stanislav Kolodub, Sergey Golomazov
Director/editor: Andrey Zvyagintsev
2 hours 21 minutes
Moreover, this has the potential to reach a far wider audience than almost any of Zvyagintsev’s previous works. More dramatically concise than his last, the mercilessly depressing Loveless, and, for all its profoundly Russian sensibility and reference, more accessible than Leviathan, Minotaur looks squarely at the monster in the middle of the maze: the war — oh, sorry, Russia calls it a “special military operation” — against Ukraine, which is thought to have taken the lives of around 325,000 soldiers, with casualties conservatively estimated to be in the region of 1.2 to 2 million.
Even if that conflict has been edged off the front and home pages of the world’s media, it’s the unignorable entity that can’t be separated from any discussion of Russia and that region, unlike some of the many other smaller invasions and conflicts that were barely mentioned in 21st-century Russian-made, Russian-set or Russian-language cinema up until 2022. In the West, reviews of Belorussian-born, Ukraine- and German-based director Sergey Loznitsa’s 2018 drama Donbass (which also played in competition in Cannes) had to contain explanations of what Russia’s military invaders, the “little green men,” were doing in the Ukrainian province of the title, a conflict few outside the region were tracking.
So much has changed since then, and that’s painfully true for Zvyagintsev himself, who now lives in exile in France. As he’s shared widely in the lead up to Minotaur’s debut in Cannes, he was stricken in 2020 with a horrific case of COVID that landed him in a coma for a while and then left him temporarily unable to move when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022. Chillingly, Minotaur takes place in an unnamed Russian city around when that invasion began, although at first the special military operation is just something going on in the background. One of the first times we see the film’s protagonist, shipping company CEO Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov), at work, he’s quietly gesturing to his colleague, HR head Natasha (Varvara Zmykova), that she best click away from the news report she’s watching on her laptop showing the shelling of Ukrainian cities.
Later on, he will be instructed by the city’s mayor (Vladimir Friedman) to submit the names of 14 men from his workforce to send to the military “recruiters,” people who will be shipped straight to the front with barely any adequate equipment or protection — a point that, were this mentioned in a film made in Russia itself, could end up getting the filmmakers arrested. Zvyagintsev and his team (he’s been reunited with many of his regular key collaborators, including DP Mikhail Krichman, production designers Masha Slavin