Minotaur review – Andrei Zvyagintsev’s scorching noir intrigue amid the Ukraine war
Cannes film festival: The great Russian director’s first film for almost a decade is tremendous drama following the ill-deeds of a mini-oligarch who comes up with a toxic new way to feed Russia’s war machine
Life during wartime is the theme of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film. It is set in provincial Russia, a portrait of a nation paralysed with disillusionment and fear, slowly coming to terms with, or retreating into collective denial about, the terrible mistake in Ukraine. It’s an inspired variation on Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle from 1969, mixed with Gogol’s Dead Souls and the 14 sacrifices required for the Minotaur in Greek myth. It is also a noir thriller of infidelity and vengeful murder, lent a new meaning by the context of deadly cynicism and political bad faith, a world in which powerful people, gloomy with self-hate, have made covering up misdeeds their way of life.
There is a telling early scene in which the male lead, mini-oligarch businessman Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), goes out for an expensive restaurant meal with his boorish plutocrat friends and their spouses and girlfriends, including Gleb’s elegant, beautiful wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) who is almost catatonic with unhappiness. One girlfriend there tells a racy joke about a guy applying for a job on an adult movie, despite having a tiny penis unlike all the other well endowed applicants – because, he says, “all films need anti-heroes”. Minotaur is full of anti-heroes.
Gleb and Galina live in a town far from Moscow, where the letter Z is to be seen on car windshields and on the tanks being transported by train, in a handsome modernist dacha in a gated woodland estate with Gleb’s mother and their teen son. Gleb has evidently broken Galina’s heart some time back with his infidelities and now he suspects that she, too, is cheating. But Gleb has more pressing worries. He and all other chieftain-business-leaders are peremptorily called to a meeting by the mayor (whose office has a photo of Putin) and informed that Moscow needs to draft more men for the war, but doesn’t want to take away people needed for the local economy. So each firm will be required to provide names of disposable male employees who will then get the dreaded callup papers.
Like a landowner disposing of his serfs, or souls, Gleb calculates that he must offer up 14 people – but then has a chilling idea. He tells his harassed and undeceived assistant simply to advertise for 14 truck drivers, enticing them on to the official payroll with the promise of up to double the normal salary, knowing full well that these guys will be sent off to war before Gleb ever has to pay their wage bill. And he also puts this scheme to work in another, even more soul-blackeningly evil way, when he has to address himself to his wife’s infidelity, a crisis that occasions the film’s central, extended silent sequence. Here Gleb shows that, however traumatised he is by this whole business, violence and coverup come naturally to him.
Interestingly, there is a moment of classic toxic masculinity which Zvyagintsev shows us in the family home. Gleb’s son Seriozha confesses he is being bullied at school, and Gleb naturally does not consider anything so milksop or liberal as raising this with the teachers; he tells his son to grab his tormenter by the lapels and threaten to bash his face in. Delivered with enough conviction, he says, the mere threat will be enough, and gets his son to practise the move with him. On the face of it, this is a heartsinking, poisonous education in violence, all too clearly what Gleb’s own father has taught him. And yet, as we will see, the lapel-grabbing is at least honest, open and face-to-face. What Gleb is engaged in is grotesquely underhand and cowardly, something far worse. The performances from Mazurov and Lebedeva are outstanding, and Zvyagintsev’s direction is superb with his cold daylit compositions and scenes in grim streets and housing estates. Everything here looks like a crime scene.
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