LOVELESS – Review

Maryana Spivak as mom Zhenya and Matvey Novikov as her son Alyosha, in LOVELESS. Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics ©

The title of director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s film LOVELESS sums up the world that twelve-year old Alyosha (or Alexey as his name is spelled in English subtitles) lives in, but it also describes his parents failed marriage, their own toxic childhoods and the social dysfunction of modern Russian society, in this powerful, moving Russian-language drama.

Eerie, hypnotic LOVELESS is suffused with chilly, haunting and beautiful images as it takes us through a devastated life in an unforgiving society, in which money trumps human feeling and unrealistic expectations abound. There is a harsh realism to this film but also a poetic depth to this unforgettable drama.

LOVELESS debuted at Cannes and was one of the nominees for the foreign-language Oscar. This is not the first time director Zvyagintsev, who also co-wrote the script, has offered a devastating critique of contemporary Russian society. In LEVIANTHAN, the director focused on official corruption and violence with great effect. In this drama, it is a culture that promotes a hedonistic embrace of a prolonged adolescence and the pursuit of money while failing to shore up families or encourage familial affection or responsibility.

Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) is a lonely boy with few friends and a touchingly sad face. After school, classmates run home, ignoring his calls for them to wait up. He walks home alone through a wooded area along a river, playing with a discarded ribbon he finds at the base of a tree. At home, he goes to his room and plays on his computer, while his mother stares at her cell phone and coldly snarls at him to stay out of the way of the real estate person who is bringing someone to look at the apartment. The apartment is being sold because Alyosha’s parents are getting divorced. When the real estate agent and the clients come into the boy’s room to look around, they speak to him kindly but Alyosha’s mother complains about then humiliates the boy. Her complaint? He cries too much.

One’s heart breaks for this child. The audience cannot help but hope his father might offer more affection than his cold mother. Alas, it is not so, and Alyosha is truly loveless, as he listens to his parents argue viciously over who will care for him after the divorce. Rather than fighting over who gets custody of him, neither parent wants the boy, and plan to send him to a boarding school or even an orphanage. Both Boris (Aleksey Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) have other lovers waiting in the wings and their romantic, adolescent notions of a new carefree Westernized life of leisure has no room for a 12-year-old boy.

The look on Alyosha’s face as he secretly listens in out this cruel discussion is simply gut-wrenching and horrifying. The scene is chilling in its cruelty, but the director is making a point, in this compelling, haunting drama about social dysfunction in modern Russian society.

Then the parents get their wish, when the boy vanishes. The bulk of the film is taken up by the search for the missing boy and an exploration of the inner lives and toxic history that shaped his parents, against the backdrop of modern Russia.

What kind of culture creates people like this? That is the real question that director Zvyagintsev is exploring in this haunting and heartbreaking film. The director looks at the dysfunctional, toxic environment that promotes this level of irresponsible behavior. As Boris and Zyenya search for the child neither wants, their buried humanity and broken upbringings come to the surface. Both of them are searching for love that was missing in their own childhoods without any regard for the love missing from their son’s life.

At first, Alyosha mom’s Zhenya looks like the bigger monster in this Dickensian nightmare. Zhenya is more interested in her smart phone than her son, ignoring him or snapping at him when she even notice he’s there. She longs for a life of spas, dining out and selfies, a life she hopes to have with her lover. But dad Boris is no prize either,. While he is less directly cruel, he is a distant and uninvolved father. He just wants out and is too preoccupied with his young mistress, who is expecting his next child, to pay attention to the child he already has.

The director offers a searing, haunting social critique of modern Russian society, and an exploration of damaged souls. The acting is outstanding in this carefully crafted drama. Matvey Novikov is excellent as Alyosha, a lonely boy whose innocent face makes his pain all the more heartbreaking. Zvyagintsev turns these awful parents into fully rounded human beings. Maryana Spivak as Zhenya is particularly good, taking her character from the casual cruel person, peeling away the layers to reveal the little girl within who was rejected by the mother she both loved and hated. Boris is preoccupied by his precarious position at work, with a religious boss who requires employees to be married and have children, worried that news of his divorce could cost him is well-paid job. His relationship with his much younger mistress looks like he is trying to create a do-over of his failed marriage.

Some critics have focused on the broken relationship between Boris and Zyenya but it is the plight of the discarded boy that seems most wrenching. Even when he is not on screen, the boy’s presence lingers and hovers over the film and its other characters. Whatever childhood issues the parents are working out, however broken they are, their inability to see their reflection in their son and extend a little human warmth to him is what is both tragic and infuriating, at least for any parents in the audience.

LOVELESS is a haunting tale of an unloved child, the product of a loveless marriage between two people so damaged by their own childhoods they are unable to grown up enough to be parents, but an equally strong commentary on a Russian society that promotes this dysfunction.

RATING: 5 out of 5 stars