Russia submits self-bashing Cannes hit “Lefiathan” for foreign Oscar

PanARMENIAN.Net - Andrey Zvyagintsev's Leviathan, which won best screenplay at Cannes, raised eyebrows all over Hollywood when it was chosen as Russia's submission for the 2015 foreign-language Oscar on Sept. 28, The Hollywood Reporter said.

"We took this decision in favor of the Leviathan movie with a majority of votes," director and Russian Oscar committee member Pavel Chukhrai said.

The choice is startling because the critically adored film is literally iconoclastic, with a scene of drunk cops shooting up Russian leaders' portraits with AK-47s, joking about whether it was time to shoot Putin's.

The mockery is overt in one sly, laugh-raising scene where the host of a drunken shooting party offers up official portraits of former Soviet and Russian leaders for target practice, and the riflemen debate whether it’s time yet to take aim at those currently in power.

But the digs go much deeper than that. The film gradually evolves into a blatant indictment of the corruption that’s seeped into the very groundwater of government, the police force and the judiciary and a hypocritical and compromised Russian Orthodox Church, a j’accuse that will prove especially controversial in Russia.

Though the Russian Ministry of Culture funded the film, Zvyagintsev said the Ministry's chief told him "he didn't like it."

In an article headlined, Leviathan Swims Towards an Oscar, the Russian publication Gazeta.ru, which is widely read and fairly politically neutral, observed that "intrigue was added to the nomination process by Andrey Konchalovsky's withdrawal of his film, White Nights of a Postman, from consideration. ... The process is held behind closed doors, and is run by directors who were either nominated for an Oscar or who have won it (such as [Vladimir] Menshov and Nikita Mikhalkov). The last best picture Oscar won in the post-USSR period was Mikhalkov's Burnt by the Sun."

Sony Pictures Classics releases the film stateside Dec. 31.