QCinema 2017 | Loveless

Andrey Zvyagintsev's Loveless places us in the middle of a messy divorce between Boris (Aleksey Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak). The relationship has gone completely toxic, and it's clear that they are completely unsuited for each other. In the fallout, they have both found new romantic partners, Boris with an already pregnant, elfish woman, and Zhenya with a rich middle aged man. But Boris and Zhenya's union has produced Alexey (Matvey Novikov), who obviously harbors resentment against what is happening - his silent tears are part of the film's most emotionally disturbing scenes. When Alexey mysteriously disappears, Boris and Zhenya begin a search for their lost son.

Perhaps one would be inclined to think that the disappearance would unite the two again, perhaps eventually leading them to cancel the divorce, ending with a heartwarming embrace. But this is Zvyagintsev we're talking about, and the film is as bleak as it gets. The disappearance only serves to magnify the dysfunctional relationship between Boris and Zhenya. They are both shitty people, and the film takes its time to show us how they can be shitty to each other. Alexey may have vanished, but his actual disappearance may have happened earlier in the minds of these two people, with both of them rejecting his existence, one spouse trying to pass the poor child to the other.

As usual, Zvyagintsev uses the disappearance as sociopolitical commentary. In its depiction of a severely dysfunctional society, it feels more similar to his earlier film Elena (2011). Alexey's disappearance is but a symptom of a far larger and more pervasive problem: a corrupt, unethical society that has lost the capacity to be empathetic. It's a society where we see an overburdened bureaucracy passing off the case of a missing child to volunteers to avoid more paperwork. It's a society where relationships become casual, with people ever more absorbed looking at their phones or some other form of media. For example, one scene inexplicably focuses on a woman as she is asked for her number (and she gives it!), just before she sits down with her date. Loveless in this case may refer not only to the failed marriage between Boris and Zhenya, but also to a society capable of producing such a union, a society capable of producing parents capable of horrendous neglect, a society incapable of producing genuine love.

It's felt when Boris and Zhenya settle into their new relationships, the giddy, euphoric state of newfound love slowly ebbing away to reveal that these two relationships may be just as doomed as the previous one, simply because they're part of a larger social structural malady. Loveless is an accomplished work, though at times hard to watch because of the subject matter involved.