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Review
Loveless review: Andrey Zvyagintsev's pristine drama is a pitiless critique on Russia
Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev; Starring: Mariana Spivak, Alexey Rozin. Matvey Novikov, Marina Vasilyeva, Andris Keishs, Alexey Fateev. 15 cert, 124 mins.
This pristine and merciless new film from Russia’s Andrey Zvyagintsev begins in the cold, and its temperature keeps dropping from there. The opening scene of this best foreign-language Oscar and Bafta nominee is a forest somewhere in the environs of Saint Petersburg: bare and twisted trees claw at the banks of a tar-black river, while snow descends like dust.
Onto this fairy-tale backdrop wanders a child: this is 12-year-old Alyosha (Matvey Novikov), who leaves school with a gentle smile on his face, and wrapped in a thick red coat. Against the drab brown, this flash of scarlet sounds an ominous note – overtones of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and also Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now – even though it seems winter must be some way off yet.
Not far off, mind. At home are Alyosha’s parents, Boris (Alexey Rozin) and Zhenya (an outstanding Mariana Spivak), who are in the middle of a poisonous divorce. Both have new lovers they’re ready to nest with – Boris’s is already pregnant, in fact – and though no-one dares say it aloud, it seems likely that Alyosha is the only thing preventing the couple from making a clean break.
During a bitter night-time argument when they think their son is asleep, Zhenya storms out of the room, and as she pushes the door we see the boy standing silently behind it, his face clenched up in grief.
The film feels like it should be telling Alyosha’s story, but seems keener to spend time with his parents as they go about their newly separate lives. His icily beautiful mother runs a beauty salon in town and spends the evenings with her suave older boyfriend (Andris Keishs), while his doughier, dowdier father has also found a new lover who’s more his speed. Mikhail Krichman’s camera steals into their bedrooms, and captures their lovemaking in a series of skin-prickling erotic tableaux – watch and learn, Fifty Shades – but your mind and conscience keep being wrenched back to the boy. Where is he in all of this?
Where indeed. It’s only the second day after Alyosha goes missing that either of his parents notice. Zhenya panics, though Boris seems less concerned, and as a policeman later offhandedly reassures them: “The stats are on your side.”
Even so, a volunteer group that specialises in finding missing people gets involved, and their plain-spoken coordinator (Alexey Fateev) – arguably the film’s only fundamentally decent character – puts a search party on the case. There is a mesmeric, breath-catching horror in watching them at work: a strung-out row of orange pin-pricks advance into a grey valley, like explorers on an alien planet.
As in Zvyagintsev’s earlier work – not least his bitter satirical epic Leviathan – this is a small story seeded with vast significance, and as the hunt for Alyosha broadens, so too do its implications. A radio news programme warns of an increase in “apocalyptic sentiments” among the population, while financial, geographical, and generational divisions all play their part in stymying the search. With her face set in stone, Zhenya jogs on a treadmill in the national Olympic tracksuit – a real 21st century Mother Russia, going nowhere yet locked unswervingly on course.
A detour to visit Zhenya’s own estranged mother, who lives in a tumbledown rural compound, becomes a nastily funny set-piece that makes clear the only thing that can reliably transcend all social and cultural divides is coldness – from parent to child, state to citizen, husband to wife and back. In Zvyagintsev’s Russia, cruelties are paid back twice over in kind, and a fresh snowfall, covering everyone’s tracks, is never far away.