The writer-director and co-writer Simon Liashenko moved a 1969 French story into provincial Russia, and the reset is what makes the screenplay work.
PARIS, France (Screenplay Biz) – Remakes have a bad reputation among screenwriters, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur is a useful case for anyone who wants to know when one is justified. The exiled Russian director and his co-writer Simon Liashenko took Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller La Femme Infidele (The Unfaithful Wife) and rebuilt it around the mobilisation drive that followed Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The result won the Grand Prix at Cannes and is now an awards-season screenplay contender.
France has picked the Russian-language film as its international Oscar entry, and the Gotham Awards have nominated the script in the adapted screenplay category, where the credit appears as Simon Lyashenko and Andrey Zvyagintsev for MUBI, according to The Film Stage’s report on the nominations. The spelling of the co-writer’s surname varies by outlet; this article follows Screen Daily’s review.
Why a 1969 thriller needed a new setting
In an interview with Screen International about returning to work after a 40-day coma, Zvyagintsev explained that the central story of Chabrol’s film moved him, but that he found its office storyline underdeveloped. That is a precise and transferable diagnosis. He did not set out to preserve the whole source; he identified which part carried feeling and which part was thin, and he planned to rebuild the second.
The timeline matters. According to the same feature, work on the script began in the autumn after the invasion, when the draft mobilisation was under way. Reuters, in a pre-release profile carried by The Star, reported that the director had been unable to secure the rights to the French film until that same year, and that the story was then relocated from suburban Paris to a bleak Russian town and rebuilt around the war. Zvyagintsev told the agency that a version made earlier would have been quite different.
“If we had made the film in 2018, it would have been completely different.” – Andrey Zvyagintsev, Reuters
Replacing the weak subplot with the strongest idea
The office plot is where the adaptation does its real work. In the finished film, as Reuters describes it, Gleb owns a logistics company and is coping with his wife’s affair when the local mayor presses him to name 14 employees for military service. He refuses to send his current drivers to the front, recruits new ones with promises of high pay, and then sends them to war. The business subplot that Zvyagintsev thought underdeveloped in the source has become a moral engine for the whole story.
The research behind it was unglamorous. Zvyagintsev told Reuters that online videos of Russia’s mobilisation campaigns helped shape the screenplay. For a working writer, the point is that the specifics of the new subplot rest on documentary material, not on general political mood.
- Source: Claude Chabrol’s 1969 thriller about an unfaithful wife.
- Writers credited: Andrey Zvyagintsev and Simon Liashenko, per Screen International’s review.
- Setting: provincial Russia, with the action placed after the invasion; filmed in a Latvian town because the director cannot shoot in Russia.
- Language and financing: Russian-language, with a French lead producer after mk2’s Nathanael Karmitz learned of the remake plan.
Structure built on withholding
Screen International’s review of the film is useful on structure. The critic notes that most of the running time establishes a stifling marriage and deliberately holds back the erotic and thriller elements a viewer expects from the source. The murder comes late and lands harder for the wait. The cleanup that follows is played at length and almost in real time, and the film closes on an ambiguous black-and-white image of clouds.
The reviewer reads the slow pacing as a gamble that pays off, and reads the cleanup sequence as dark, silent-comedy territory that never turns death into a joke. Not every viewer will agree that a patient first two acts is worth it, and the review does not claim that the approach suits every audience. It does show how a genre skeleton can be kept while the pleasures of the genre are postponed.
What screenwriters can take from it
The following is analysis, drawn from the reported facts above rather than from anything the writers themselves said about method.
- Audit a source before you adapt it. Zvyagintsev kept what moved him and rewrote what he found weak. Decide in advance which element of the original you are really buying.
- Let the world change the plot, not just the wallpaper. Moving the story to a Russian town was not cosmetic; it produced a new central dilemma, the list of 14 names, that did not exist in the French film.
- Ground topical material in documents. The mobilisation videos gave the writers concrete behaviour to dramatise, which is safer than paraphrasing headlines.
- Pace is a writing choice. A late murder and a long cleanup are scripted decisions about what to delay and what to linger on.
Where the project stands
The film opened in French cinemas in mid-October, and the awards run now depends on how voters respond. The Gotham ceremony is scheduled for the end of November, according to The Film Stage. A detail the sources do not settle is how many drafts the script went through; neither the Screen International interview nor the Reuters profile describes the rewrite process, so any claim about it would be guesswork.
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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/