A successful businessman contends with the war in Ukraine and his wife’s infidelity in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s stern drama.
Andrey Zvyagintsev makes domestic epics, staging scenes from collapsing marriages in confident single-take master shots, his widescreen frame enlarging homely and monied interiors alike so that the conjugal entropy at the center of his films seems to stand in for the spiritual malaise of Russia at large. His frequent use of Western classical music and literary allusions adds an additional, almost mythic element to stories of husbands’ rough hubris and wives’ wasting vanity.
Hi new film, his first after a near-death COVID ordeal that saw him spend 40 days in a coma, takes its title from the beast at the center of the Labyrinth – the half-man, half-bull whom the kings of ancient Crete could only pacify with the once-a-decade sacrifice of 14 citizens. In Zvyagintsev’s film, set in 2022, Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov), owner of an import-export business in an unnamed city, must provide 14 of his able-bodied employees for conscription into the imminent war against Ukraine, to the major whose patronage he enjoys.
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Fittingly given its transposition of Greek myth into contemporary Russian politics, Minotaur was actually shot in the European Union, in Latvia, Zvyagintsev having moved to France in 2023 following his recovery. And the more direct source material for Minotaur is a French film, Claude Chabrol’s La Femme infidèle – better known to Anglo audiences as the film remade as 2002’s Unfaithful. Gleb, like Richard Gere in Adrian Lyne’s late-cycle erotic thriller, enjoys all the trappings of privilege: a Frank Lloyd Wrightish modernist house at the end of a long, gated driveway; a headphone-sullen teen son; a glamorous housewife, Galina (Iris Lebedeva), wasting away at her daily chores and in a succession of barely-there nighties.
This being a Zvyagintsev film, Gleb is hardly Gere’s hapless nice-guy cuckold: it’s intimated that he’s carried on his own affairs in the past, and he and his male friends make great sport of one’s ribald age-gapped mistress while out for a boozy dinner. (They’re out smoking; the wives are in the powder room, talking about their plastic surgeon.) As the film begins, disquiet is already in the air. Massive billboards (clearly digitally inserted into the Riga cityscape in postproduction, for obvious reasons) advertise enlistment bonuses for new Russian soldiers, and Gleb has begun to suspect that Galina’s frequent trips into town are about more than shopping and the salon.
Indeed, the mayor has passed along the Army’s request for a list of conscripts from Gleb’s payroll – no one is to be considered too essential to the business to be excluded, and Gleb is already hemorrhaging employees and profits as rumors of war swirl. And, Gleb’s chief of security soon enough confirms for him Galina is enjoying a riotous affair with a young photographer, lazing away the days in his tower-block flat, posing for boudoir snaps amid repeated bouts of ecstatic lovemaking – erotic abandon, with an edge of bohemian transgression outside of the materialism and rigid gender roles of her home life.
Gleb’s professional and personal crises will eventually collide, in a film of novelistic ironies that follow the heavily foreshadowing philosophical dialogue of the film’s first hour. (Gleb advises his son never to throw the first punch, but to use intimidation and leverage; he and his friends argue about whether or not servants alienate them from a direct experience of life, which is pretty rich from guys grown comfortably sleek on the spoils of the Russian kleptocracy, for whom the lives of others are cells on a spreadsheet, and as easily manipulated or deleted.) Zvyagintsev paces his camera movements for a sense of portent and inevitability, slowly panning the full 360 degrees around a room, long enough to register the changing intensity of the daylight filtering through a window, and he holds on everyday actions long enough for them to become monumental.
This is especially true of the film’s centerpiece, a sequence that takes up more than half an hour of screentime, involving the disposal of a corpse. Each step of the way – the cleaning of the crime scene, the hiding of the body, the disposal of the evidence – Zvyagintsev lets us sit with the scrambling desperation of an amateur murderer until we feel the anxiety rising in our own pulse. Following its Chabrol source material, Minotaur is in direct conversation with Hitchcock, with near-quotations from Rear Window, with its paranoia around surveillance, and Psycho, with its multiple guilt-stricken and agonizingly slow crimes and cover-ups. In Hitchcock, suspense technique makes us squirm until we feel, viscerally, how frightening and shameful it is to be accused, wrongly or rightfully, of wrongdoing, how pathetic one feels when subjected to such intense and hateful scrutiny.
As an anatomy of Russian society, Minotaur depicts decay in a register that at times looks perilously similar to lethargy. But it’s intriguing, in a lingering way, that Zvyagintsev places the Russian oligarchy in such a vulnerable, almost sympathetic position – it’s perhaps perversely optimistic, a statement of the dominant order’s crumbling power and impending comeuppance.
