Andrei Zvyagintsev
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Cannes Dispatch #1: Ismael’s Ghosts, Loveless, Wonderstruck
It’s fitting that the Cannes film festival, presently celebrating its 70th incarnation, would choose to open this edition of shameless and unbridled self-reflexivity with a film that does the same. Arnaud Desplechin’s latest, Ismael’s Ghosts, is pure, saturated Desplechin (at least when he isn’t tipping his cap to Hitchcock’s Marnie and Vertigo), perhaps to a fault. Detailing a years-spanning love triangle set to its maker’s characteristic whip-pan rhythm, this is a vision so consciously expressive and overloaded with formal decoration (time jumps, iris-ins, rear-projection montage, direct address to camera and so on) that it finds itself explicitly likening its manically layered […]
by Blake Williams on May 18, 2017 -
“A Little Person Against the Government Machine”: Andrey Zvyagintsev on Leviathan
When Andrey Zvyagintsev brought Elena — his corrosively apocalyptic attack on the Russian oligarchy— to Cannes in 2011, he was alternately direct and evasive about its pessimistic national diagnosis. One interviewer was informed Zvyagintsev had considered calling the film Invasion of the Barbarians, but was another was told that focusing on class issues was missing the larger moral point. Much has changed in three years, and in interviews Zvyagintsev has been adamant that his fourth feature isn’t exactly what it appears to be — i.e., another head-on broadside against different segments of Russia’s ruling class. Leviathan can be unreductively considered a direct continuation/extension of Elena‘s line of argument, not least in again […]
by Vadim Rizov on Dec 25, 2014
