Minotaur Review – Andrei Zvyagintsev’s horrors during the Ukrainian war | Cannes Film Festival

Lus during the war is the subject of Andrey Zvyagintsevthe movie. It has been established in the region of Russia, the image of a country paralyzed by fear, gradually accepting, or going back into collective denial, a big mistake in Ukraine. It is an inspired evolution Claude Chabrol’s La Femme Infidèle from 1969the organizer is Gogol’s Dead Spirits and the 14 sacrifices required of the Minotaur in Greek mythology. It also contains the unspeakable joy of betrayal and revenge murder, given a new meaning by the story of the dangerous cynicism and bad faith of politics, a world where powerful people, sad and hateful, have made hiding evil their way of life.

There is an early telling of the incident where the man in charge, the mini-oligarch businessman Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), goes to an expensive restaurant with boorish plutocrat friends and their wives and girlfriends, including the beautiful Gleb, the beautiful wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) who is almost catatonic and unhappy. A girl there tells a dirty joke about a guy applying for a job at a big movie, even though he has a small penis unlike all the other talented writers – because, she says, “all movies need anti-heroes”. Minotaur is full of anti-heroes.

Gleb and Galina live in a town far from Moscow, where the letter Z can be seen on windshields and tanks being transported by train, in a beautiful modern dacha in a mountain area owned by Gleb’s mother and her son. Gleb has apparently broken Galina’s heart at some point in the past with his infidelity and now she suspects him of cheating too. But Gleb has many worries. He and the rest of the prince-business leaders are invited to a meeting with the mayor (whose office has a portrait of Putin) and are informed that Moscow needs to recruit more men to fight, but they don’t want to remove important people from the local economy. Therefore, every company should provide the names of the male employees who will receive the bad papers.

As a landowner losing his serfs, or souls, Gleb calculates that he must give 14 people – but he has an interesting idea. He tells his beleaguered and unsuspecting assistant to announce 14 truck drivers, enticing them to go to the government payroll with the promise of an increase in wages, knowing full well that these boys will be sent to war before Gleb pays their wages. And he also puts the plot to work in a different, more sinister way, where he has to deal with his wife’s infidelity, a problem that makes the film’s central, silent continuation. Here Gleb shows that, even if he is frustrated by the whole business, violence and hiding comes naturally.

Interestingly, there is a moment of toxic masculinity that Zvyagintsev shows us in the family home. Gleb’s son Seriozha admits that he is being bullied at school, and Gleb naturally does not think of anything like milksop or freedom as raising this with teachers; He tells his son to hold the torturer with ropes and threatens to hide his face. Given enough conviction, he says, the threat alone will be enough, and he makes his son try to move with him. In his eyes, this is a terrible, terrible lesson in violence, clearly what his father Gleb taught him. And yet, as we shall see, taking the reins is honest, open and face-to-face. What Gleb is doing is obvious and scary, something very sinister. The performances from Mazurov and Lebedeva are excellent, and Zvyagintsev’s direction is excellent for its chilling music and beautiful scenery in the rough streets and in the houses. Everything here looks like a crime.