"Loveless" is another film in the career of Andrey Zvyagintsev, who directly or indirectly attacks and denounces the most cruel aspects of "Russian reality." This time, however, the angle has changed - there is no monstrous bullet of Leviathan (2014), which drew everyone's attention three years ago. The tape is an average between the Elena (2011) chambermaid intimate Moscow drama and the philosophical-existential proverbs with the biblical flavors of Return (2003) and Exile (2007). Zvyagintsev, together with Sokurov, is not accidentally led by the greatest living Russian director of the 21st century. With it, almost every frame represents a brilliant synthesis of the simplicity of the natural and spiritualized formalism of the "conceptual", thus creating an uncompromising apocalyptic "metaphysical cinema." The very title of the film suggests that it will be much more than a drama about the disintegration of a family. Zygyantsev's "unhappiness" is not only the cruel diagnosis of reality in modern Russia, but also a perfectly working metaphor for the vector of development of the whole colorful in its multi-faceted "destitute" new world. "Loveless" creates a consistent introvert / intimate environment in which the radical Zurich's characteristic criticality acquires a new intensity. On the other hand, the typical for the director since his earliest creative maturity gave his new project an amazing weight. Zygyantsev himself points to Bergman as the main inspiration for Bergman's "Scenes from a Family Life," but also to see the influences of Tarkovsky, Breson and Antonyion, which are characteristic of his movie. And perhaps the most interesting and valuable thing in his work is that in the 21st century he is trying to continue the monumental filmmaking of the directors in question.
The story, however, is so simplistic that it does not allow that grand swing with the sword aimed at the heart of Eastern Europe that imposed the macabre atmosphere in Leviathan. Two people no longer love, the divorce is forthcoming, but no one wants the child - the fruit of the same "unloving". It decides to escape from home and disappears without a trace. That's all Zygyantsev has to make us see the sinister posture in which he thinks Russia is stubborn. In order to achieve the desired effect, the tape stands out and seals a bunch of small details such as the moments in which heroes dismissively put the radio on and the news tells of the ongoing war in Ukraine and the "carcinogenic" influence of the West in the region, so silence with the heavy sound of a intrusive propaganda machine. At the very beginning of the film, Boris (the father of the escaped boy) is listening to a story about how the world will end in a few months, and that is precisely what becomes the starting point for the unfolding of the apocalyptic decay / charge of the plot. And the end of the world really comes because people have lost the only thing that constituted everything existing as such - love. A direct reference to Leviathan is to lay the living death of the heroes in the strangely humorous environment of contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, which is destined to be a crutch of the regime and reproduce its messages and models with envied "Jesuit formalism." The family can not be separated and must exist in the hell of their villain, because Boris's boss is a fanatic believer and if he divorced he risks losing his job. This is perhaps the first film of Zygyantsev, who is totally deprived of the little light that was hiding as a criminal by law in his previous projects. In the shadow of Leviathan, for example, the agonizing body of love still struggling for a breath of air in an "orthodox" world where long faith and hope did not exist. There is no agony in Love, love is already dead, and Zvyagintsev can only serve her panichid. The gruesome control tool in which the Russian church has turned does not need even her commanding breath, and only her skeleton in the wardrobe shows that there is a fault that no propaganda or Orthodox TV show can redeem. The missing boy, like the one from Tarkovsky's Sacrifice, becomes a symbol of the missing life and meaning. The child can not be found by government officials or non-governmental organizations because love is irretrievably lost. The soulless dead heroes of the Zigyantsev are stealthily looking for something that has long been theirs.
At the end of the movie, "Everything Is Lost", the unloving has totally exhausted its simulation / life-giving and meaning-and only death and emptiness remain to wait for the Apocalypse of the modern world. One of the latest scenes in "Loveless" perfectly summarizes his message - the mother runs in place (on an electronic path) until the eye of the camera stays on her sweatshirt, written in large red letters "Russia". From now on, nothing new or different can happen. Unhappiness is eternal hell, only the endless repetition of its stubborn emptiness as in Bella Tar's Torino horse. Even death will not offer the heroes any hopeless hope, because they have all been dead for a long time.
