“It was very important to highlight that moment when one cannot escape ethical responsibility”
– CANNES 2026: The exiled Russian filmmaker talks to us about his free adaptation of a Claude Chabrol film, set against the backdrop of the war launched by Russia in 2022
(© 2026 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa – fadege.it, @fadege.it)
Unveiled in competition at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, Minotaur is the sixth feature film by the Russian director (now in exile) Andrey Zvyagintsev.
Cineuropa: What strange twist of fate led you to the idea of loosely adapting Claude Chabrol’s film The Unfaithful Wife (1969)?
Andrey Zvyagintsev: The idea came to me in 2017 or 2018, after I’d finished Loveless. I asked my old friend Joël Chapron to draw up a list of the most important French films from the 1960s and 1970s, to see if there wasn’t one I’d like to remake. Initially, I’d wanted to remake Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, but there was a rights issue. At that point, since I had this idea of a remake, I thought to myself: why not another film? So I watched all the French films on Joël’s list and realised that it was The Unfaithful Wife that caught my attention the most and that I remembered best. Because, beyond the title of course, you realise very quickly, within three minutes of the film, that the woman is unfaithful. So it’s a sort of anti-suspense. Then, we spend half the film observing, through the husband’s eyes, this woman he suspects and whose infidelity he is about to be confirmed. For me, observation is the very essence of cinema, something that has always fascinated me. And another thing that really interested me in Claude Chabrol’s film was that moment when the hero, caught up in an emotional state, kills the lover. There was a very long sequence there without any dialogue; we simply watch his movements. In my view, that is pure cinematic genius. When I saw that in Chabrol’s film, I thought to myself that, for someone like me who had always dreamed of directing a very long sequence without dialogue, with only actions, I had plenty of scope to let myself go, to have fun in a way. But I had this idea for a remake back in 2018, and there was no war yet. I simply thought I’d transpose it into a Russian context, and even back then, I felt that Chabrol hadn’t been interested in his character’s professional life. It was something he’d completely left out and you didn’t even really know what job the main character did. Right away, I thought I’d have to fill that gap, but I didn’t yet know with what.
Then, in 2022, six months after the war in Ukraine began, Nathanaël Karmitz (mk2) confirmed to me that he was interested in working with me. It was September, two weeks later the infamous partial mobilisation began in Russia, which was an absolute disaster for the Russian people. Almost as much, I would say, as the start of the war itself. It destroyed, shattered and ruined so many lives; it’s unimaginable. So, in a way, this historic moment found its way into the film. And my co-screenwriter Simon Liachenko and I agreed that this was what would give substance to and create tension in the professional side of Gleb’s character. So we interwove the political and the personal in the film, and that’s how we built the film as it is now.
How did you approach this multi-layered narrative, which could even be interpreted as a parable if we consider the main character’s wife to be its territory?
I really like the metaphor you’ve suggested. But I could take it even further. Let’s say that in the film, there are many layers to it. We also see a kind of intimacy, a shift from accident to barbarity if we consider, for example, the murder Gleb commits during the film. At first, he acts in a state of emotional distress; he didn’t come with the intention of killing this man. But then, when the other man starts moaning on the carpet and he realises he’s still alive, yet decides to throw him off the balcony anyway — that, right there, is barbarism, a fully conscious murder that’s very different from the first act. We also see how things shift and how responsibility cannot be sidestepped. And there is also all that terrible ethical responsibility the character shoulders, which he would have preferred not to bear. He would have preferred never to see the faces of these people whom he has, in effect, condemned to death — those 14 people. But life decides otherwise, since Natalia, his HR manager, takes him into the room, proud to show him that she had achieved the impossible — hiring these 14 people — because she didn’t know what the plan behind it all was. And because of her, he sees their faces. It was very important to show this moment, which makes it impossible to escape ethical responsibility. And then he spots this young man, who is only 21, and thinks to himself that he really ought to save him. But by saving him, he condemns someone else. The film raises many questions about ethical responsibility and murder.
What were your main intentions in terms of direction?
As usual, I worked with a lot of long takes. What’s more, the villa we chose is a sort of transparent aquarium. A lot of things happen through the windows. You watch a scene, you hear the sound from outside, and the events unfold through the glass. We sought to create this separation in all the sets. You see it in Gleb’s office, in the open-plan areas, in the company entrance, and so on. It’s to show the characters’ difficulty in being together, in being in the same spaces, in living together.
With this film, have you gone from being a filmmaker in exile to a political opponent?
Let them decide that for themselves. I just make films. I’m a Russian director living outside my own country. But even from here, I cannot help but speak out about what is now on everyone’s mind, about what is occupying the thoughts and emotions of Russians today.
(Translated from French)
