The Russian drama Loveless, nominated for 2018’s Best Foreign Language Oscar, wouldn’t be the first to show how a deteriorating marriage destroys other lives in its wake. But Loveless isn’t just bleak, it’s bitter, with contempt for how the culture that still lingers from the Soviet Union breeds hatred and distrust across generations.
Zhenya and Boris (Maryana Spivak and Aleksey Rozin) are long past salvaging their marriage. Zhenya is cold and superficial and Boris is distant and noncommittal, and neither of them wants their son. Loveless reveals its observant sensitivity when in a single shot Zhenya storms to the bathroom after a heated argument with her husband, oblivious that their son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) has been eavesdropping and sobbing behind the door.
Alyosha runs off, but the horror comes in how long it takes Zhenya and Boris to even notice that he’s gone. They’re each engrossed in new affairs, and we feel for their desire for love and meaning in their lives even as we cringe over their neglect. Zhenya reveals she has no interest in being a mother and finds love with a wealthy businessman who adores her. Boris’s new lover is close to giving birth to their child, but even Zhenya realizes that he’ll get bored with this new life before long, just as he did with her.
What evolves from here is an engrossing mix of a crime procedural with a story of a family in crisis. When volunteer investigators start interviewing Zhenya and Boris to work on finding Alyosha, the questions reveal just how little these parents know about their son. Director Andrey Zvyagintsev has more interest in exposing how these people live without love than in uncovering the boy’s disappearance.
At one point, Zhenya and Boris will go to visit her hostile, hermit of a mother. She’s refused calls, locked herself behind fences and won’t come to the door. It’s not the start of unraveling a mystery, but a heartbreaking dead end. Zhenya’s mother berates her and condemns her choice to ever have had a child, and it’s not hard to see where Zhenya’s own hatefulness comes from. But in a nice touch, the camera doesn’t leave the room when Zhenya does. It lingers on her mother for just a moment longer, watching her sigh in grief over having to live with this bitterness.
That touching, observational quality carries over into a scene that could double as its own short film. Alyosha may be hiding out in a massive abandoned building. The search party walks amid the remnants of the Soviet Union’s former glory, and you feel as if this broken feeling is institutional in Russia.
Zvyagintsev isn’t afraid to be critical of Russian police or policy, with news of the turmoil in Ukraine playing on TVs or radios in the background. But he’s just as perceptive and cynical toward the people he sees, whether it’s watching the doldrums of Boris’s office or in a garish, overhead shot of Zhenya getting her body waxed.
Loveless’ gift is that it’s as much reminiscent of Prisoners as it is A Separation. It’s an unbearable, devastating drama with tension that makes it impossible to wrench yourself away.
4 star
if i’d caught up with this in 2017, it’d probably be my candidate for best movie of the year (which tells you a lot about how much–or little–i’ve seen) * still, i’m not exactly sympathetic with your choice of approach to it, brian: this film’s all about tone (AND formal awareness and execution–remarkable!), about loneliness–the child, the mother, the father, the grandmother (one of the best cameo rants i’ve ever seen) … who else?–and, with the introduction of the search party and its resolute leader, about community and its possibilities even here, in this oxymoron of vistas, from the assertively “natural” to the assertively rubble strewn: all those teeming overhead shots, of children playing in winter parks (breughel’s HUNTERS IN THE SNOW comes to mind–to MY mind anyway), of searchers tromping through open forests (spot coloring in their yellow and red reflective jackets)–chill and sunless everywhere, and still there’s “life,” this evidence of something we might call caring (even the mother’s breakdown in the interrogation room–one more remarkable set piece–her screaming at the husband re their vanished son “i’d NEVER’ve given him up!”), that’s seemingly a far cry from the cynicism and indifference you’ve opted to underline * yes, an overarching picture, but more of sorrow, of “what, after all, can these people, with all their preliminary givens, do?” * despairing?–in a sense, but also there’s the hope, however fumblingly everyone goes about it, that even in this seeming existential cesspool the stirrings of possibility will always be there * pretty complicated in its own way, at least from my point of view, and not at all easy to parse out, to capture in its more elusive glimmers * but here i am going bonkers trying to say what pretty obviously i can’t … not “experimental” enough (though it is) and not unconventional enough (though it is that too), yet what remains to be said is: see it! * i do hope everybody will …
Thanks Pat! The sense of community you talk about is something strong that I didn’t think about. These are all volunteers, not even necessarily neighbors or family, and yet they’ve all come together to do this, to find this kid they have no connection to. Not something you’d necessarily see in America. And yeah, that cameo from the grandmother is fantastic.