Yesterday I watched the film that this is a remake of – Chabrol’s The Unfaithful Wife. I suspect it kept me intellectually rather than emotionally engaged with the story.

You may have seen the 1969 original or its 2002 remake Unfaithful with Richard Gere and Diane Lane. I’ve probably seen that but I don’t really have a memory of it.

What is distinctive about The Unfaithful Wife is how buttoned up everyone is, and how Chabrol doesn’t give you the motivations of the characters or much depth behind why they are in the situation they are in. This lets us project our feelings and also imagine a certain amount of agency and complicity between the couple.

Andrey Zvyagintsev (Leviathan (2014), Loveless (2017)) remakes the movie almost scene by scene in present day Russia. Successful and slightly harried businessman Gleb (Dmitriy Mazurov) lives in a gorgeous house in the countryside with a slightly troubled teenage son and a beautiful wife Galina (Iris Lebedeva). There are rumblings at work because the war is happening and people are fleeing and being conscripted to fight.

We can see that the business leaders are in with the government and part of a system where you scratch each other‘s back to make sure you survive. When asked to provide 14 employees to be sent to the front, Gleb has an ingenious way of doing this without undermining his loyalty to his staff. This, as a point of interest, no doubt references the film’s title as King Minos had to sacrifice 14 people each year to the minotaur.

As you might guess by the unfaithful wife of the OG’s title, Galina is having an affair and Gleb is aware of it. Whereas in 1969 Paris, he needed a private detective, in contemporary Russia, it is a bit simpler.

I don’t really want to talk about what happens, as although you might see it coming, it is a pivotal point in the plot that up ends the lives of both Gleb and Galina and, ironically, brings them together.

This is not 1969 Paris though, and we know that it is harder to be silent and private and go undetected. Zvyagintsev has another way of depicting this part of the narrative, something that seems much more bleak and awful.

I thought hard about the final scenes, which in The Unfaithful Wife were somehow understandable. Here I couldn’t quite understand Galina‘s motivation and suspected she was trapped in a system that she couldn’t get out of. – maybe what I was bringing more than what the director intended or what was shown.

Where is the original was a fascinating look at marriages and passion, or lack of passion, what is most interesting about this film is the politics of Russia and the war and how power operates. The story of the marriage seems to pale in importance.