What's Not to Love

It has been two years since Andrei Zvyagintsev won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, for his widely acclaimed Leviathan, which looked at the relationships between those who have power and those who do not. So naturally his newest film, Loveless, released in June (to be released in the US later this year on Sony Classics), has been highly anticipated.

Loveless is about a couple (Boris and Zhenya) ending a toxic relationship, untangling property while already entangled with new loves. There is bitterness and nary a sympathetic character in the film, except perhaps for the couple’s unloved 12-year-old son Alyosha (whose unwanted birth incited their union), who goes missing.

Russian film critic Anton Dolin raved about the film after its debut in Cannes.

“Loveless knocks you off your feet,” he wrote for Meduza.io. “Such perfectionism in every detail is not found in anyone else. Nowhere else is there such a combination of depth and simplicity, complexity and approachability, formalism and naturalness. At least not in Russia…. The film is sparing, compact, energetic, and in all things concrete – from the background of the characters, to their motives. Formally, it is a domestic drama. Yet, of course, it is something much more.”

Oleg Zintsov, writing for Vedomosti, also praised the film, if less effusively, for offering a searing appraisal of modern Russia. “If Elena and Leviathan were diagnoses that one could either accept or dispute, then Loveless is more like a forensic medical examination. Andrei Zvyagintsev suggests that the viewer identify a dead, decaying social corpse. The viewer can cover his face with his hands, cry, and refuse to make the identification. But the director has no doubt about the results of the autopsy. His scalpel is sharp, and so is his point of view, albeit a bit limited by the walls of the morgue.”

Meanwhile, on the western side of the pond, Emily Yoshida at Vulture.com is less smitten. “Zvyagintsev’s film lives up to its name, but it’s hard to suss out what it’s a condemnation of, exactly: conservative orthodoxy, bikini waxes, and selfies are all targets at different points. Women in particular can’t seem to do anything right…. almost every woman who passes through his frame is some kind of vapid witch, whether its Zhenya’s hateful mother, or the braying selfie-takers passing by on the sidewalk or sitting at the next table over.

“It’s not clear where all this is going… It’s all elliptical, and what’s meant to feel portentous feels like borrowed meaning. The search for Alyosha takes us through top-shelf metaphorical imagery — crumbling institutional architecture, a child’s brutalized corpse — but it’s clear early on that this isn’t going to be the kind of film where anyone gains any insight. They’re all hopeless cases… Loveless gives us a multicourse meal of social ills, too dispersed to feel like a thesis, yet too chilly to feel like a raw, unbridled tantrum.”

Over at the LA Times, Stephen Zeitchik is more enamored, while focused on the political import: “You might need to be more metaphorically inclined to consider Boris and Zhenya as symbols of a Russian state that has abandoned its children… You won’t, however, need to look very hard to glean the messages from other signposts: The background voices of state-run Russian broadcast media offering propaganda on subjects such as the war in Ukraine. An image of a character wearing a sweat shirt emblazoned with ‘Russia’ as she runs in place on a treadmill. A police force indifferent to the concerns of citizens.”

Likewise, Owen Gleiberman at Variety calls the movie “compelling and forbidding,” typifying it as “made in a forceful and deliberate socialist-realist Hitchcockian style.”

“What the movie is about,” Gleiberman writes, “in a way that’s both potent and oblique, is something larger than the charred ashes of one dead marriage… [it] takes an ominous, reverberating look not at the politics of Russia but at the crisis of empathy at the culture’s core… A society rooted in corruption becomes a petri dish for a loveless marriage that spawns a family in which a child isn’t loved — that is, looked after — in the right way. And the result, seemingly out of nowhere (but not really), is tragic.”

Given the loveless state of East-West relations of late, it is interesting to find general unity (despite some different evaluations of the film’s art) among reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic, that Loveless is an important movie – a touchstone for understanding modern Russian society. Which makes it a must see for any Russophile.