Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Minotaur,” winner of this year’s prestigious Grand Prix at Cannes, is the curious case of a remake that doesn’t escape its original’s orbit, and doesn’t want to. It mirrors Claude Chabrol’s 1969 erotic thriller “La Femme infidèle” (The Unfaithful Wife), the story of a businessman who murders his wife’s lover. But while Zvyagintsev doesn’t stray too far from the original plot — or that of Adrian Lyne’s 2002 Hollywood version, “Unfaithful,” starring Richard Gere — he unearths new layers by setting it during the early days of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Just as Chabrol and Lyne established feelings of domestic contentment by setting their tales in upscale Parisian and New York suburbs, Zvyagintsev sets his version in a small but tidy Russian town (that the exiled director re-created and filmed in Latvia). It is a nondescript setting that, like earlier iterations, reminds us that moral chaos can lurk just beneath a pristine surface. But the film’s tilt-shifted telling is as much about the backdrop as the foregrounded plot details. Of the three filmmakers who’ve told this saga of jealousy, Zvyagintsev is the first and only to do so in a wider political world. We first learn about the conflict when wealthy shipping magnate and minor oligarch Gleb Morozov (Dmitriy Mazurov) stumbles upon a perturbed office employee watching leaked videos of Russia’s shelling of Kyiv, which he dismisses as mere distraction. When Gleb begins suspecting his wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva) of having an affair with suave photographer Anton (Yuriy Zavalnyouk), the story quickly returns to this premise, entangling his influence over the war (and over people’s lives) with his efforts to uncover Galina’s infidelity. For example, when the Russian government asks Gleb to nominate dozens of corporate employees to join the country’s war effort, this affords him unfettered power over the plot; he slots characters around the story’s chessboard like pawns. The mandate also imbues him with godlike dominion over life and death, a portent of his forthcoming domestic skirmish, in which he feels especially empowered. The movie bides its time … but its pieces all slide gradually, satisfyingly into place. The ongoing tumult alters the fabric of unfolding events, changing how they played out in previous versions. When Anton is considered a missing person, it seems probable — to the investigators closing in on Gleb — that he has joined the thousands of educated Russians who fled the country or went into hiding to avoid the draft. “Minotaur” is a much darker version of Chabrol’s tale, as well as Lyne’s, down to the cynical way it closes both their open endings (without revealing too much, Gleb’s corrupt political influence is a major factor). Though we’re never shown the actual carnage on the front lines, Zvyagintsev brings this violence home, when he uses Gleb’s cruelty — both physical and emotional — to mirror how the poisonous glow of nationalism, corruption and militarism refract through every rung of Russian society.
The devil is in the details. A vital character moment for both Chabrol and Lyne involves the cleanup of a crime scene — a sequence exposing their characters’ raw nerves and anxieties. In “Minotaur,” the equivalent chapter is shot with an eerie reserve, with a sterility designed to keep viewers at an arm’s length, for better or worse. Unlike Michel Bouquet’s Charles Desvallées in “La Femme infidèle” and Gere’s Edward Sumner in “Unfaithful,” Mazurov’s Gleb is a much more calculating figure. He approaches his wife’s affair with an almost sociopathic restraint, as though he weren’t hurt by the betrayal so much as offended by it. He cleans the blood and disposes of the flesh in more languorous detail than did his forebears, as if fully desensitized to the brutality of his crime.
That “Minotaur” is a heady study of modern Russia doesn’t rob it of its emotional charge and narrative power. The movie bides its time, demanding patience in the process, but its pieces all slide gradually, satisfyingly into place. Their motion is guided by a pessimistic view of humanity, grounded in an understanding of the myriad ways social and political hierarchies permit and accommodate violence. Zvyagintsev is not only deconstructing the story, he is reforging it through a fatalistic lens. In “La Femme infidèle” and “Unfaithful,” the murderous centerpieces were presented as shocking anomalies. In “Minotaur,” they are chilling inevitabilities, in a world where the value of human life is calculated on a corporate spreadsheet — and where snuffing one out is as mundane as using an office shredder. After all, when war rages on in the background, what’s one more body?
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