Review: Loveless

Loveless (15)

Russia/France/Germany/Belgium 2017  122 mins  Subtitles Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev  Cast: Maryana Spivak, Alexei Rozin, Matvey Novikov, Marina Vasilyeva

It opens with a series of chilly snowscapes and, frankly, doesn’t get warmer over the next couple of hours. Lauded Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Oscar nominated follow-up to Leviathan (also an Oscar nominee) puts a stark, tragic downer of a spin on the child custody battle drama, this being a pitiless, Haneke-esque tale in which neither neglectful parent wants the wretched kid. Naturally, there’s much to be read into it as a depressing parable about the new Russia.

https://youtu.be/9gYwlMCWRs0

We’re in a grim suburb of Moscow where the marriage between Boris (Rozin) and Zhenya (Spivak) is in its death throes. They can no longer stand the sight of one another and the atmosphere is positively poisonous, but the couple are forced to remain under the same roof until their apartment is sold. Complicating matters is their mostly silent, desperately sad 12-year-old son Alyosha (Novikov), who sobs as he overhears his parents’ bitter rows, most of which are about what to do with him after they separate. Both want to be rid of the kid, especially as they’ve each embarked on extra-marital relationships and are eager to move on with their new lives. Then Alyosha disappears. Neither Boris nor Zhenya notice until his school asks why he’s stopped attending. The under-resourced cops don’t seem interested, since experience has shown that runaways are ten a kopek and tend to turn up eventually. It’s left to a volunteer community search team to scour the dilapidated local apartment blocks and abandoned factories.

Had this been a mainstream Hollywood film, the search for the missing child would probably have become a police procedural that brings the estranged parents closer together and concludes with a big tidy moral about the importance of family. Mercifully, this isn’t a mainstream Hollywood film, and Zvyagintsev takes it in a much more interesting direction, slowly revealing more about the miserable couple. Boris has some kind of dull desk job in a firm run by a Christian fundamentalist, contemptuously referred to as ‘beardy’, who expects all his employees to be married with children. He’s already knocked up his new girlfriend, the needy Masha (Marina Vasilyeva), presumably in the hope that he can retain his job after the divorce with a ready-made substitute family. Ambitious beauty salon owner Zhenya has taken up with a rich businessman, who seems to be her passport to the rarified world of Russia’s new elite. In one of the couple’s toxic arguments, she tells Boris that she never loved him and only married him to get away from her mother. When we meet the ghastly old bat, we not only find out why but also get a sense of history repeating itself.

Zvyagintsev is very specific in setting his film in 2012, against the backdrop of alleged apocalyptic Mayan prophecies about the end of the world and Russian state propaganda about the war in Ukraine, as if to envelop personal torment in political and social unease. And in all of this, friendless, tragic Alyosha remains no more than a cypher – an unhappy reminder of a marriage of convenience that each selfish parent is eager to put behind them. Loveless is no date movie then, and proves unremittingly bleak even by arthouse feelbad standards. But those brave enough to dip a toe in its icy waters will be rewarded with the beautifully controlled, carefully framed and emotionally harrowing work of a master filmmaker, who offers no easy respite or glib catharsis.