Russian Movie ‘Leviathan’ Gets Applause in Hollywood but Scorn at Home

MOSCOW — In many ways, the movie “Leviathan” is Russia’s greatest cinematic accomplishment in years, maybe decades. The Golden Globe winner this month for best foreign film, it provides an unrelenting, vodka-soaked portrait of small-town corruption that has been praised by critics and filmmakers throughout the world — everywhere, it seems, but Russia.

Well before its long-delayed general release here on Feb. 5 it has polarized the country, acclaimed by many as an accurate rendering of life in the Putin era and condemned by others as enemy-of-the-state propaganda that should be banned.

The fact that few Russians have actually seen the film has done nothing to dampen the arguments. The national fracas is being compared to the denigration of previous significant artists who won fame abroad for their unsparing depictions of Russian life, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Boris Pasternak.

“One of the reasons for this almost universal condemnation of ‘Leviathan’ has to do with the general situation today in Russia,” said Vladimir Posner, a veteran Russian journalist. “A great many people feel that they are being unfairly criticized, ostracized, dissed by the Western world and that they have to protect themselves.”

The Ukraine crisis only added to a sentiment brewing for years, he and others noted.

“Anything seen as being critical of Russia in any way is automatically seen as either another Western attempt to denigrate Russia and the Orthodox Church,” Mr. Posner said, “or it’s the work of some kind of fifth column of Russia-phobes who are paid by the West to do their anti-Russian work or are simply themselves profoundly anti-Russian.”

So far not a single official has so much as offered congratulations on Twitter to Mr. Zvyagintsev, the director, for the movie’s many awards, an unprecedented snub in recent years.

“Leviathan” would be a tough film for the government to later rally behind, given its unforgiving focus on the centralization of power and the role of Orthodoxy, twin pillars of Mr. Putin’s rule.

However, many in cultural circles expect that if the movie does win an Oscar, the Kremlin will find a way to embrace it as a collective achievement.

“They didn’t want a national discussion because in the end it will turn out that the most famous movie outside Russia is oppositional,” said Mr. Dondurei, the film critic. “If it wins the Oscar, that will change because it will be for the glory of Russia.”

Alexandra Odynova and Sophia Kishkovsky contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on January 28, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Russian Movie Gets Applause in Hollywood but Scorn at Home. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe

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