Loveless

Synopsis: An estranged Moscow couple, Boris and Zhenya (Alexey Rozin and Maryana Spivak) both have new partners and want to divorce and start their lives over. But then their 12-year-old son disappears after witnessing one of their bitter fights

At its very broadest, the title of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film is the director’s description of the soul of modern Russia, a point he makes unnecessarily obviously with the film’s penultimate scene, that of his main female character, Zhenya, stonily exercising on a treadmill in a track suit whose top says exactly that – “Russia”.  Of course no single word can sum up a country but Zvyagintsev makes a devastatingly convincing case for its applicability with an unrelentingly comfortless film.

Loveless opens with a camera pan across a silent, snow-covered landscape before cutting to a shot of children finishing their school day. This is relatively neutral material but quickly we find ourselves witness to a failed marriage. Boris is a bit of a lump, afraid that a divorce will damage his job prospects, if not get him fired altogether, whilst the more sef-possessed Zhenya vents her spleen on him with undisguised contempt (he has got another girl pregnant of wedlock, just as he did Zhenya). Both of them are caught up in promising new romances and neither of them wants to take their 12 year old son (Matvey Novikov). This immediate instance of lovelessness is extended and expanded once the boy disappears and a search for him begins with a resignedly unhelpful police officer, through derelict buildings dripping with rain and melted ice and over the surrounding barren landscape and a visit to Zhenya’s curmudgeonly mother who despises her social-climbing daughter and useless husband. Meanwhile television and radio news reports describe Russia’s deteriorating relationship with the Ukraine, Zhenya and her boyfriend make love in his impersonal, dimly lit apartment and Boris begins to realize that his new romance is not the escape he thought it would be.

Watching Loveless one can’t but help reflect on how merciless Zvyagintsev’s treatment of his core subject is compared to how Hollywood would handle the same material. There are no sympathetic characters, no sentimental flourishes or hyped-up plot turns but rather the film in general and Mikhail Krichman’s camera in particular moves with clinical detachment to its final despondent shot, one which echoes the film’s opening and whose silently cold indifference suggests an equivalence on the spiritual level. As the credits roll you will be pinned to your seat by the oppressive weight of what you have seen and Evgeniy and Sasha Galperin’s almost literally stunning music. Not what most people will be looking for from a night at the movies but for those who care Loveless is an eloquent film in the Tarkovskian tradition.

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