Cinecism: Minotaur Is the Modern War Film We Needed
Words: Maia Wyman
Make it stand out
Minotaur, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest feature and Grand Prix winner at Cannes, is a beautiful glass house that’s waiting to be shattered. Based on Claude Chabrol’s 1969 film, The Unfaithful Wife, Minotaur is about the head of a successful transportation company, who, along with being asked to submit fourteen of his employees for draft in the Russio-Ukrainian war, suspects that his beautiful wife Galina may be having an affair.
Zvyagintsev returns with his usual sleek veneer. Gleb’s work, set against the grisly backdrop of war, is all clean lines, cool palettes, and sparkling glass. His personal life is chic but bereft of feeling. Mikhail Krichman’s camera roves constantly and clinically around its subjects. Almost no face is spared from its gaze, except for Galina, who, for the first third of the film, the camera often refuses to foreground. But Galina, “tired of being in [Gleb’s] shadow,” is struggling with an ennui that threatens to disrupt their careful order and take centre frame. ___STEADY_PAYWALL___
“Minotaur is a powerful indictment of Russia’s bloated war apparatus, never resorting to histrionics, but holding its subject by the collar and staring it dead on.”
Minotaur is about control. Zvyagintsev, an exile of Russia and vocal dissident to the war, drops this classic tale of adultery upon a sophisticated war machine that uses a robust surveillance apparatus to turn citizens into nothing more than moving dots on a screen. We get the sense at the start of the film that Gleb, who finds himself pulling the strings to which lives are attached, has too much control and is uncomfortable with it. He balks at the order to give up their names and information, saying that they are like family.
However robust the Russian war machine may be, it is faced with threats from all directions. It is like Gleb’s stately glass house, designed to perfection but a stone’s throw away from fracture. Gleb is, we suppose, the very same. The film’s sleek surface is pockmarked by violent emotional outbursts, just as every even-keeled social interaction is thrown off by the intrusion of alcohol. His orderly manner is disrupted by an act of violence so messy, one would suspect the glass has been shattered. But overtime it’s revealed that Gleb is no different than any other powerful player in this apparatus, to whom human life has little to no value. As the line between work and home begins to collapse, everyone in Gleb’s life becomes expendable personnel.
We are also expected to believe that Galina is Gleb’s foil. She lacks control, by virtue of being shunted to the side of the frame, and faced with the daunting task of filling her empty and aimless days. But an inkling creeps on you in the final act, as you watch Galina, whose smiling and distant face is lit so often by her phone, sob and writhe in bed over her ennui, as boys from her country are rounded up like cattle and sent to die, that she may be every bit as callous and removed as her husband.
Zvyagintsev keeps his stone in hand. Gleb and Galina fly with their young son on a plane to Crete, known derogatorily as the island of liars, and stare calmly at an endless stretch of ominous grey clouds below. A billboard reading “Eternal Glory to Our Heroes” falls limply to the ground. As much as we know that just beyond this shot it will be put back up again and continue to loom imposingly overhead, we watch it for a while as it lies there in the grass, crumpled and illegible. The image sticks.
Zvyagintsev builds his glass house around the salacious and the explosive. For all the messy misdeeds and endless instances of corruption, the film itself remains coolly detached. Minotaur is a powerful indictment of Russia’s bloated war apparatus, never resorting to histrionics, but holding its subject by the collar and staring it dead on.
