I became a devotional admirer of Russian director Andrej Zvyagintsev after seeing the blistering, anti-Putin Leviathan (’14) in Cannes. I didn’t like 2017’s Loveless quite as much, but it’s obviously a scalding, no-bullshit, grade-A reflection of a certain poisoned layer of affluent Russian society.
Four years later Andrej was pulverized by a Covid infection and then sank into a coma (hospitalized for 11 months). He wasn’t out of the woods until ’22. But now, happily, he’s back in the swing with a new film…health restored, onward and upward, etc.
Alas, I’m sorry to report that, for me, Minotaur itself is not very good or certainly not good enough.
Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is a morally-condemning, socially-reflective remake of Claude Chabrol‘s Le Femme Infidel (’69)…a sexy-but-bored-wife-cheating-on-her-wealthy-husband drama that weaves in a strong vein of anti-Putin and anti-Ukraine War commentary, and is permeated by the usual fumes of moral corruption among the moneyed classes.
Minotaur‘s basic message is that a husband murdering his wife’s boyfriend (the inciting incident in the Chabrol film as well as in Adrien Lyne‘s 24-year-old Unfaithful, an above-average remake, so don’t give me with the spoiler whining) isn’t that much of a moral or legal problem if the murderer belongs to Russia’s wealthy corporate class. All he has to do is ask a politically submissive top-cop friendo to order the investigating detectives to back off, which they do after getting the word.
The problem is that Minotaur is simply not as well made as the Lyne version. I respect the attempt by Zvyagintsev and Simon Liashenko to mesh a bad-marriage saga with the poisoning of Russian society by way of Putin’s criminal malice and the Ukraine War, but the meshing, for me, doesn’t work. The Putin-Ukraine stuff doesn’t feel like it really belongs alongside the infidelity story. They’re not really interwoven.
Plus the cuckold husband Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) is an extremely dull pudgebod figure and basically a lousy hang. Two minutes after sizing this guy up I understood why his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) was cheating on him. (The lucky lover is a slender, bearded photographer named Grigoriev.) I felt badly for poor Richard Gere in the Lyne version, but zero compassion here.
And the murder and body-disposal scenes are fairly ridiculous. If you’re going to clean up a bloody apartment killing you need to use serious cleaning solvents and disinfectants, and not just wipe the floor with paper towels. And then Gleb throws Grigoriev’s rug-wrapped body off a sixth-story, apartment-building balcony in broad daylight, with God knows how many dozens of residents of nearby apartments potentially watching from their respective windows. And then he casually dumps the body in a river — no attempt to bury it in the country, or chop it into pieces with the head and fingers destroyed, or perhaps reduce it to cinders in an industrial furnace.
I’m glad that other critics have praised Minotaur, and that it will probably connect with general audiences on some level. I’m presuming that Zvagintsev is working on his next couple of films. More power to him. All will hopefully be well.
