Andrey Zvyagintsev, who is famous for his stellar work in The Return, Leviathan and Elena, directed Loveless, an unremittingly bleak but absorbing film set in Russia in the fall of 2012. If you are a fan of his work, run to the theater because it is finally available in the US, specifically Massachusetts’ Kendall Theater, and it was a treat to finally see his work on the big screen, but less of a treat to hear people gripe for the entire length of the movie because apparently they were unfamiliar with his work, which they found slow in comparison to The Square, which I did not see, while simultaneously not understanding the rather simple plot points of this movie. Philistines! Also if you even considered seeing the cinematic garbage called Red Sparrow, Loveless would be a perfect inoculation against watching unrealistic, dated, Cold War leftovers from anti-Soviet era propaganda reheated and reused for today. Plus Loveless is shorter than Red Sparrow!
Loveless focuses on a separated husband and wife and the far-reaching consequences, intended and otherwise, of their split. If the family is the foundation of society, and the children are the future, then Loveless seems to suggest that Russia’s future is open-ended and will end badly. If you are familiar with German films, then you may be aware that German films or films set in post WWII Germany explore the emotional consequences of being descendants of Nazis and the paranoia of living in a formerly Communist country. Loveless seems to be delving into parallel territory and suggests that the children of Soviet Russia were emotionally stunted because natural affection was a rare and expensive commodity if you wanted your children to survive in a hard world. The key to the whole film is when the camera lingers on the grandmother after she is left alone, and the audience gets a glimpse of her true feelings. Now that the world has more superficial comforts, as the now adult children of Soviet Russia are preparing the next generation, they are self-absorbed in healing their own wounds, hoarding love for him or herself, but never distributing it. They only mimic the behavior of their parents, a flinty coping mechanism of wounding others and harshness. Even if someone else’s good fortune would benefit you, you hope for their downfall and disaster if they hurt you.
When they are roused by actual, present harm and not licking old injuries, their emotional palette is so unsophisticated that they still fall back on their strongest emotion, anger, even if it is inappropriate for the occasion. Eventually, in order to cope, they must try to submerge their individuality into an active, voluntary, professional group and silently model their behavior in the hope that it will resolve the problem, but anyone who has seen Zvyagintsev’s films know that happy endings are unlikely. They try to act like the shepherd of Luke 15, but they do not have the good shepherd’s voice. They are more like the hired hand or the stranger of John 10. When they cry out, the first eerie tone of the soundtrack appears and repeats later at the sign of the first snowfall, winter.
God is not a redemptive force in Zvyagintsev’s Russia. He doesn’t appear, or he silently looks down with the potential for punitive action. There is certainty of an apocalypse, but it is more like the T.S. Eliot poem, “The Hollow Men,” “This is the way the world ends. This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.” The final scenes with the father at his new home and the brief, haunting scenes of the married couple’s son suggests that the world already ended, but they did not notice.
Zvyagintsev seems to be finding new ways of depicting the desolation of apocalypse in ruins, homes and nature. The only one who walks through nature, even if it is artificially cultivated by man nature such as parks, is the married couple’s son. It is the only place that he is welcomed, and the last time that we see him happy. Only a child can enter the kingdom of heaven, and parks may be the closest that people get to Eden. A window separates people from nature, and what an individual sees when he or she looks out onto the world and how they respond to this vision is dependent on their present circumstances and mindset. The pregnant wife touring the married couple’s home is filled with hope and pleased, but no one else seems engaged by its vision. They are unaffected by what they see.
There are times when people plunge into the wilderness, but it is only for a purpose, not a moment of communion. It is a place that man still fears. The children are attracted to the thinnest walls of civilization, the ruins of Soviet Russia, in subconscious hopes of returning to a purer state that existed before that since it is as close as one can be in nature without being subject to its harshest elements.
People’s vision of the world is further mediated and separated by screens and technology. I cackled at how appalled Red Sparrow’s Matron would be at discovering that Russians have also succumbed to the wilds of the Internet. Homes are shadowy, dark places of secret pleasures or pain depending on the contents of the room, but by the end of Loveless, these homes show no trace of a person’s existence. These artificial creations are only as loyal as the human beings that own them otherwise they can move on quickly, unfeelingly. People act as viruses-infecting others’ homes and filling it with whatever ills they brought with them. Only nature remembers and is affected by us if we care to look. We cannot see God. We cannot see each other.
Loveless is a masterpiece of unsentimentality. It meditates on life before, during and after a tragic turning point without creating the illusion that we know and understand exactly when that point occurred. Life is not that clearcut for those that experience even though there is a specific point. The tragedy does not retroactively imbue earlier moments with poignancy or change us for the better or worse. The bravery of this film is to suggest that often times, people will be the same. The most devastating aspect of this film is not what is lost, but how easy it is to dismiss what is mistakenly found as unimportant and keep it moving.
There are two strange and unsettling moments in Loveless. The unseen cameraman suddenly is interacting with a random woman in the restaurant and gets her number while she is on a date. The wife is running on a treadmill and seems to look directly into the audience or possibly the cameraman. I usually could attribute the second scene as a silent admonishment to the audience to learn from their mistakes if it wasn’t for the prior scene. It appears that Zvyagintsev is inserting himself into Loveless and finds himself just as morally bankrupt as his characters with slightly more awareness of his flaws.
Loveless is another must see masterpiece unless you can’t stand subtitles or have a low tolerance for unremitting bleakness. If you dig Russian films, see it!