‘Leviathan’ From Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel
By A. O. SCOTT, The new York Times
“Leviathan,” a product of the Sensory Ethnography Lab at Harvard, offers not information but immersion: 90 minutes of wind, water, grinding machinery and piscine agony. The experience is often unnerving and sometimes nauseating, because of the motions of the juddering, swaying hand-held camera and also because of the distended eyes, gasping mouths and mutilated flesh of the catch.
At other moments, like when the film tracks the flight of gulls across the night sky or plunges into the North Atlantic water amid a cascade of starfish, it has a dreamy, enchanted beauty. There are also passages of abstraction that are both beguiling and disorienting, in which it becomes difficult to distinguish big from small, natural from mechanical.
An ordinary landlubber visiting a vessel like the one in “Leviathan” would have a better sense of what was going on than a viewer of the movie, which allows speech to be drowned out by the roar of the elements and the screech and thump of engines and hydraulic winches. But it may be that Mr. Castaing-Taylor and Ms. Paravel’s intention was to capture what it is like to be a fish, hauled up from the sea floor in a huge, crowded net and flung onto the deck, where men in rain gear tramp around with buckets and knives.
The brutality of fishing, as opposed to its romance, is emphasized here. The skate wing that you might enjoy with brown butter at a restaurant table was secured with a meat hook and a machete, and the scallops on your companion’s plate were acquired by similarly violent means.
Not that the filmmakers are pushing a vegetarian or environmentalist point of view. They are trying, instead, to take in the details and rhythms of life and death at sea without ideas or preconceptions. In the final credits they record not only the names of the crew members but also those of the fauna around them, including Larus marinus (commonly known as the sea gull) and Melanogrammus aeglefinus (appearing on menus as haddock).
Ms. Paravel and J. P. Sniadecki brought a similar approach to the chop shops of Willets Point, Queens, in “Foreign Parts,” and so did Mr. Castaing-Taylor when he sojourned among the sheepherders of Montana in “Sweetgrass.” Those films felt a bit closer to the journalistic traditions of documentary than this one, which is committed, above all, to capturing the profound strangeness of an ancient and embattled way of existence, for man and fish alike.
Leviathan
Opens on Friday in Manhattan.
Produced, directed and edited by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel; directors of photography, Mr. Castaing-Taylor and Ms. Paravel; released by the Cinema Guild. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the Americas at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 1 hour 27 minutes. This film is not rated.
