The biggest challenge facing a viewer in the opening moments
of Leviathan is working out just what in fact they are looking at. The film
opens in darkness, presenting us with murky, indecipherable images and a
soundtrack of mechanical sounds with a few men's voices being barely audible
above the din. As our eyes adjust to the image and the camera begins to reveal
more of its surroundings, we realise we are onboard a fishing vessel somewhere
in the middle of the ocean at the dead of night. We are watching commercial
fishermen hauling in a huge catch, with cameras apparently fixed to the
helmet of one of the men giving us as subjective a view of this procedure as
cinema can manage. At least we can be thankful that the film has no way of
expressing the smell.
Co-directors Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel haven't
kept any kind of objective distance from events on board this trawler, and
instead they have plunged straight into the midst of it, using a number of
small cameras positioned around the vessel and given to crew members. These
cameras have captured the tumultuous nature of the sea, and the violent
struggle between man and nature, with a visceral immediacy that is equal parts
disorientating and exhilarating. Leviathan is also a powerful argument for the
redundancy of 3D, as few film experiences are as immersive as this.
Lucien Castaing-Taylor's last feature film was Sweetgrass,
which he co-directed with Ilisa Barbash (but went uncredited), and like that
film, Leviathan is an examination of men at work, and a way of life far removed
from regular society. But whereas Sweetgrass had a leisurely rhythm entirely
appropriate for its portrait of sheep being herded across a mountain range,
Leviathan possesses a harder and faster editing style; the film is a maelstrom
rather than a ramble. The cutting is sharp throughout and from the vast amount
of footage they collected from their multiple viewpoints, the filmmakers have
astutely picked out a series of striking images that instantly imprint
themselves on viewers' minds. From close-ups of dying fish packed inside the
trawler's huge nets to a shot of blood-red water pouring over the side after
the catch has been gutted, Leviathan consistently finds seemingly incidental
details that feed our sensory experience of this vessel.
Towards the end of Leviathan, the filmmakers include a
lovely shot of one fisherman sitting in the break room and slowly nodding off
in front of the TV. It's a rare moment of quiet in a film that thrives on chaos,
and while the men involved in the expeditions that Leviathan captures are all
credited at the end of the film, they don't make any impression in the film
itself. They remain on the fringes as they work diligently and efficiently, no
more human than the machinery utilised in their process. Perhaps this is why I
was slightly less satisfied by Leviathan than Sweetgrass. The shepherds being
followed by that earlier film offered a point of engagement for the audience, their
journey provided a narrative shape, and the fact that their way of life was
coming to an end gave the film an affecting elegiac quality. This film doesn't
offer any such hook for the audience, as Castaing-Taylor and Paravel disregard
any rules of documentary filmmaking, and this approach can be both thrilling
and vexing.
Even if I found it sometimes frustrating to watch, there's
no denying the astounding formal achievement that's evident in Leviathan, with
the expert editing and sound design being particularly praiseworthy. The filmmakers
occasionally emit a whiff of pretension, through decisions such as opening with
a quote from the Book of Job ("He maketh the deep to boil like a pot: he
maketh the sea like a pot of ointment.") or listing the Latin names of
every creature caught in the end credits, but they have created something
spectacular here. Leviathan's signature image may be the remarkable upside-down
shot of countless seagulls following the trawler, and that's what the film does
at its best; it forces us to look at the world from a different angle, seeing
commonplace occurrences through fresh eyes. Leviathan is exploring territory
that's centuries old – in fact, it was filmed in the same waters that Melville
used for The Pequod's epic pursuit of a whale in Moby-Dick – but the manner in
which it has been created makes this primal struggle between man and nature
feel dramatically new.