Starring: Maryana Spivak, Aleksey Rozin, Marina Vasili
Distributor: Palace Films
Runtime: 127 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2018
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With a title like “Loveless”, audiences would not necessarily be expecting a cheerful entertainment. And, since the film comes from Russia, that might be another indication for very serious themes and treatment. And for those who know the films of the director, Andrey Zyagintsev (The Return, Banishment, Elena, Leviathan), they would appreciate that for 15 years he has been looking very seriously at a Russian society, the post-Soviet era and the transition from totalitarian socialism to the impact of capitalism and individualism in society and, especially in this case, in the family.
The film opens and closes with beautifully bleak fixed camera gazing at forests, lakes, snow – and then the glimpsing of high-rise buildings in the background. We are in a Russian provincial city, the usual location for Zyagintsev’s films. After this invitation to contemplation and reflection, the camera gazes at a building – then doors suddenly burst open, children running out from school, and a focus on one young 12-year-old, walking solitary, finding a long piece of material and tossing it up into a tree branch. This is Aleksey who is then seen at home, doing his homework, finding prospective buyers of the family apartment inspecting. His parents are divorcing. We can see that he is angry, even resentful.
This is compounded when we see his mother and father and the audience is made observers, unwilling participants, in their constant and loud, bitter bickering – with a boy outside the door, weeping.
The film then spends quite an amount of time building up the characters of the mother and father, and the terrible flaws in those characters. There seems to be nothing redemptive about the mother, resenting her marriage, her unexpected pregnancy, her wanting to have an abortion, especially with her harsh mother’s advice, her husband persuading her against it, her feeling her life has been ruined, that she deserves some happiness and comfort – and is willing for her husband to take custody of the son whom she resents. The father, on the other hand, seems a milder character, says that he wants his son to stay with his mother because she is the better nurturing parent for him at that age. She disagrees, saying a father is better for the son.
The next step is to find that each of them is in a new relationship. This is a threat to the father because his company, with leaders who take more fundamentalist Christian approach to morals, does not tolerate divorce. He has also taken up with a young woman, a rather clingy woman who is long-term pregnant. On the other hand, the mother is in a relationship with an older man, wealthy, divorced, with adult children.
While the parents might have forgotten their son, the audience has not. Then the news comes that he has disappeared.
The bulk of the rest of the film is concerned with the details of the search for the boy – rather intense, perhaps a bit long for many audiences who might find this section somewhat drawn out. There are volunteers for the search, groups combing through the woods, calling out the boy’s name, searching a warehouse and basement, printing posters to be put around the city…
There is some suspense, of course, as to whether the boy will be found. And we are made privy to the reactions of mother and father, still some bickering between them, going to the boy’s grandmother who is a severe and condemnatory woman.
In fact, with the atmosphere of the film, it is a microcosm of Russian society, and, of course, a microcosm of world society showing its self-centredness. A pervading atmosphere of lovelessness.
Oscar nominee for 2017, a powerful portrait, depressing and challenging.
Peter Malone MSC is an Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting.
This Russian film tells the story of the disappearance of a young 12 yr old child, who has been traumatised by the marriage breakdown of his parents. The film was shot in and around Moscow, and won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017. It was voted as one of the top five Foreign Language Films of 2017 by The National Board of Review.
Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) is the only child of two desperately unhappy people. His mother, Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), and father, Boris (Aleksey Rozin), are caught in a “loveless” marriage. They are in the final stages of a bitter divorce, and fight with each other constantly, and one of their bitterest arguments is about who will take custody of their child. Alyosha feels unloved, and unwanted, and knows he is a burden on them both. His parents have formed new relationships, that are intensely physical. Zhenya is partner to a wealthy, older man, Anton (Andris Keiss), and Boris is partner to a young woman, Masha (Marina Vasilyeva), who is pregnant with his child. When his parents are home together, Alyosha hears every fighting word between them.
Zhenya comes home late one night and realises in the morning that her son has disappeared, and hasn’t been home since the day before. The Police think that Alyosha has simply run away and will return in a day or so. He does not return, and a volunteer group goes in search of him. Tense at what has happened, Boris and Zhenya break out in fresh fighting. Later, they go to a morgue to discover that a child who was found is not their own, and posters are put all over town giving the identity of their missing child. Boris moves in with Masha, and Zhenya moves in with Anton, but their new relationships show developing tensions. The film ends by showing us the branches of a tree swaying in the wind near a river bank, with a strip of tape that once belonged to Alyosha.
The film is a dramatic depiction of a family in crisis that is searing in intensity. It offers a cultural look at modern life in Russia, rather than a political one, and it tackles complex issues, such as how a so-called advanced society fails to reinforce social bonding. Zhenya is addicted to her smart phone; the Police are too short-staffed to do any checking; and families simply pass on their conflicts to the next generation. The film communicates compellingly how civilians in Russia are unhappy with their government, but it unnervingly explores the tragedy of a family in crisis. Its cinematography is cold, and unforgiving, and the acting is superb. The camera captures a child unseen by his bickering parents, silently screaming. The film communicates tellingly and movingly how people waste their lives by losing moral purpose in a Society that is not perceived as a caring one – a group of volunteers eventually go looking for the missing child, not a group set up by the Police, who are too bureaucratic to provide help when needed.
The wrenching performances in this film remind one of the dramatic intensity of Ingmar Bergman’s “Scenes from a Marriage” (1973). So real is the bitterness of Zhenya and Boris, with Aloyosha caught between them, that Boris and Zhenya show no humanity in the way they interact with each other and treat their son. This not a movie about a lost boy, so much as a film about a child who is abandoned by parents who fail completely to provide him with love. The background of the film suggests a world in turmoil, and encroaching wars, but the human crisis is always kept up front. Instead of bringing the parents closer together, the loss of their son increases their unhappiness with each other. They are angered and frustrated by the knowledge that they have little hope of finding their son, unless they join forces together. The film communicates the feeling that Aloyosha has “vanished” well before he was ever reported “missing”.
This is a film that attacks the complacency of what family life can become, if it is allowed to do so, and it shows brilliantly what can result when moral duty is ignored. The film gives a sobering lesson on how “not” to parent, particularly in an environment, as Zvyagintsev depicts it, that is burdened with an officialdom, which shows no soul.
Peter W. Sheehan is Associate of the Australian Catholic Office for Film and Broadcasting
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