“Minotaur” is a film about a husband murdering his wife’s lover.
It’s about more than that too. Maybe. The main character is a Russian business executive named Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) whose professional life is taken up with finding efficient, low-impact ways to carry water for an authoritarian regime that’s currently feeding its young men into the human grist mill that is the war of aggression against Ukraine.
When a government official tells Gleb he needs to deliver 14 conscripts for the war effort from out of the company’s ranks (here’s the human sacrifice element that makes for the allusion to the Greek minotaur myth), the executive shows his cunning by directing his second in charge to hire 14 schlubs off the street so he doesn’t have to part ways with his own employees.
Whether the maneuver is done out of compassion for people he’s worked closely with or concern about losing competent labor in a competitive market, it’s not clear. What is clear is that Gleb is the kind of guy who doesn’t care whether you think well or badly of him as long as everyone, including himself, keeps up appearances that he’s living a respectable and praiseworthy life. Plus, we’re introduced to his friend circle, which includes characters with more offensive personalities – so how bad can Gleb be? He’s the picture of middle-of-the-road, amoral survivalism in the bourgeois ranks of Putin’s Russia.
There’s something in this film that is political and thrilling, even if it’s not quite a political thriller. A husband murdering his wife’s lover is the main thing that the film hangs its hat on. By the time the murder happens – almost by accident, definitely on purpose – we know that whatever larger geopolitical events form the time and place of the film, the point of focus is suffocatingly close-cropped on the unhappiness of Gleb and his disillusioned wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva). In the sumptuously filmed interiors of their modernist home, nestled against a woodsy backdrop, they pick at each other, spoken and unspoken accusations of infidelity hanging constantly in the air.
There’s also a teenage son, Seryozha (Boris Kudrin), who suggests to the audience, against most available evidence, that the unhappy husband and wife were a loving father and mother once upon a time. Gleb’s most humanizing moment comes when he sits down with a distressed Seryozha to teach him how to fend off a local bully. We see the caring parent for a moment before the general inertia of the plot reminds us that this episode is just another entry into the general ledger of violence that settles all debts in “Minotaur.”
The film did gangbusters at the Cannes Film Festival, winning the Grand Prix. And why not? It’s gorgeously shot with the help of director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, who makes everything from office meetings to forest walks look eye-bleedingly beautiful. It’s timely and politically on point, taking a swipe at corruption in Putin’s Russia. It’s based on the French film “The Unfaithful Wife” (1969) by Claude Chabrol, so it comes with a pedigree. And it spotlights miserable bourgeois wretches behaving badly, handling the misbehaviour with enough style that you might even start apologizing for it by the end of the film. There’s a lot for the French to like, and you might like it too.
The takeaway, however, remains elusive. The main entree we are served is the brutal murder, and the long, drawn out, amateurish attempt to stash the body, disguise the crime and evade responsibility as the local police close in on their suspect. It makes for effective cinema, the slow-burning setup, snapped to attention by sudden violence, followed by a gradual fade to black as the plot details a farcical machinery of justice. So what?
It’s hardly illuminating – any average news article about what life is like under an authoritarian regime in the 21st century will tell you just as much. But the world of cinema needs a pat on the back every once in a while for being topical and ideologically sound. So here we are.
“Minotaur” Directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. Written by Simon Lyashenko and Andrey Zvyagintsev. Starring Dmitriy Mazurov, Iris Lebedeva and Boris Kudrin. Running time 135 minutes. Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller.
