Many in the world, especially in America after 2016 election, consider Vladimir Putin's rise to power in Russia as the greatest evil that has befallen the world this century. On the other hand, whatever one may think about the current Russian president, it is easy to imagine that his ascent made some people fortunate — among them, even some who fundamentally cannot stand his regime. One such example is Andrey Zvyagintsev, a filmmaker who belongs to the so‑called ‘Other Russia’, that is, pro‑Western liberal opposition circles, but who, in spite of this, owes his career precisely to Putin. He became famous back in 2003 with his award‑winning film The Return, a dark drama understood in the West as an allegorical warning that Russia had begun straying from the correct Yeltsin path and might end up in the old autocratic times instead of a democratic utopia. After that film, Zvyagintsev directed a series of works with similar content and atmosphere — bleak and depressive dramas showing the underside of life in Putin’s Russia, in a manner similar to that in which the authors of the Black Wave portrayed life in Tito’s Yugoslavia half a century earlier. Zvyagintsev’s latest film is the 2017 drama Loveless, which has won a number of prestigious festival and other awards, including the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.
The protagonists, played by Maryana Spivak and Aleksey Rozin, are Zhenya and Boris, a relatively well‑off married couple who have decided to divorce. This is a perfectly understandable decision, because they no longer love each other, and it seems they have found happiness with new partners — Zhenya with Anton (Martins Ksics), a wealthy man whose grown‑up daughter lives in Portugal, and Boris with Masha (Marina Vasileva), a young mistress who is expecting his child. The divorce would go smoothly if it were only about dividing their joint property, but there is a problem in the shape of their 12‑year‑old son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov). Neither spouse wants the boy, and each desperately tries to palm him off on the other; if they cannot reach agreement, they mention boarding school as an alternative. Alyosha becomes aware of the situation, so it may not be a huge surprise when he one day disappears. Zhenya and Boris are suddenly forced to remember their parental duties and start searching for him. The long and arduous search, however, yields no results — except that the two spouses, forced to spend time together, find additional reasons to express hatred toward one another.
Zvyagintsev originally conceived Loveless as a Russian remake of Bergman’s famous Scenes from a Marriage, but he had to abandon that plan due to copyright issues. The screenplay, however, is a triumph of simplicity, depicting a perfectly ordinary story and relatively straightforward yet convincing characters, brilliantly portrayed by Spivak and Rozin. Zvyagintsev puts far more effort into creating a specific and rather bleak atmosphere, using long takes in the manner of Tarkovsky. Apart from the cast, set design plays an important role in the film, namely the skilful use of locations — whether interiors that, however one might call them luxurious, appear dark and stifling, or exteriors under typically cloudy skies, which usually consist of abandoned and decaying Soviet‑era buildings, often surrounded by dark and menacing dense forests. Zvyagintsev is quite skilled, and such scenes are so fascinating that the viewer will forget the shots are extremely long and the pacing relatively slow.
Zvyagintsev, on the other hand, felt he had to give this rather ordinary, everyday story — which could take place in San Francisco just as easily as in St. Petersburg — a certain, albeit implicit, political context. His previous film, Leviathan (2014), did not sit too well with the Kremlin authorities, and Russia’s Ministry of Culture refused to provide financial support. Fortunately, Zvyagintsev had a few admirers among oligarchic circles, and even more among bureaucrats in several Western countries who stepped in with their taxpayers’ money. Loveless thus had to acquire a certain anti‑Putin content, which manifests, among other things, in a couple of scenes showing how the regime‑friendly Russian Orthodox Church has spread into every pore of society and seeks to impose its turbo‑conservative views on marriage and sex on citizens, or in the portrayal of the Russian police as a bunch of lazy incompetents whose basic services an ordinary citizen cannot rely on. The final scenes show characters watching TV news on state or pro‑regime channels covering the conflict in eastern Ukraine, in which, of course, the pro‑Western Ukrainian government is presented as responsible for the bloodshed and destruction. One could interpret these scenes as suggesting that the story of Alyosha’s parents is yet another allegory for the sad state of affairs in Russia — that out of selfishness and conformism they abandoned their child just as their generation discarded the noble democratic ideals of the Yeltsin era. The only figures in the film who might be considered positive are volunteers from a non‑governmental organisation dedicated to helping search for missing persons, whose dedication and professionalism provide a strong contrast to the corrupt and incapable state. Although such explicitly political content represents a somewhat unnecessary ingredient to what would otherwise be an almost perfect intimate family drama, Loveless nevertheless remains an exceptionally high‑quality work that can be most warmly recommended to all true cinephiles.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
(Note: The text in the original Croatian version was posted here.)
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