Loveless movie review: Andrey Zvyagintsev's film highlights the difficulty of leaving one's past behind

Images of snow falling quietly on trees, marshes and meadows bookend Loveless, Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s allegorical meditation on his homeland’s fraught reckoning with the past as it surges wantonly into the future. Reassuring calm and familiarity appears to be implicit in these images, for there is no denying the significance of snow to the Russian mind, so ubiquitous and all encompassing is its presence. [caption id=“attachment_4235565” align=“alignnone” width=“825”] A still from Andrei Zvyagintsev’s film. Loveless. Image via Twitter[/caption] It becomes all the more important because the film packed within these images boils over with the horrid emotional turmoil of a couple’s separation and its toll on their son. But this familiarity is deceptive. Zvyagintsev appears to be drawing our attention to the cold centre of the increasing similarity between the past and the future. In part, due to the tendency of the furnishers of the future to look for its seeds in the ruins of a horrible past. Zhenya and Boris are a couple striving hard to leave the past behind. They cannot stand each other anymore and are undergoing a bitter separation. Zhenya has been driven to hate Alexey, the son, as an unavoidable reminder of the mistakes of the past. Boris, on the other hand, simply chooses to ignore him. While they’re out looking for comfort in their new partners, the son remains alone, without friends, loveless. So when Alexey suddenly disappears, the cracks in their relationship grow wider, swallowing all hope in one huge gulp. In their separate ways, the three main characters in Zvyagintsev’s film are desperately searching for love. But all of them are terrified of what they might find. Once Alexey disappears, the remaining characters in the film begin searching for him, while the parents grow even more afraid of what they might find. Consider this a police procedural that takes place exclusively inside a morgue, the characters taking turns to examine the mutilated carcass of hope, only to discover that they found the wrong body. Zvyagintsev’s intent, therefore, remains partially unclear, and his relationship with hope for his country can be interpreted differently. But the director’s devotion to Alexey is clear as the light of day. Although everyone in the film seems to consign him to the recesses of memory, Zvyagintsev remains immune to this collective amnesia, a reminder of artistic responsibility and integrity. In the face of overwhelming despair, the artist continues to bat for hope. The tragedies underlying Zvyagintsev’s films are brought to sharp relief by his usage of metaphor — more often than not frequent and heavy — and allegory. His work maintains a perilous sense of balance despite being pressed underneath this enormous visual and allusive weight. He rarely resorts to humour. If he does, it is instantly neutralised within the context of the film, like the joke told by Boris’ colleague beside the coffee machine. Nothing shall come in the way of the overweening seriousness of the matter at hand, which is in turn reinforced by the dismal environment his characters find themselves in. It can be the apartment the couple lives in (dismantled in a typical workmanlike manner at the end), the company Boris works at (where the overtly Christian boss wills that all employees have families) or the vast, overwhelming country at large (its weight of history omnipresent and inescapable). Zvyagintsev substantiates it with a muted, subdued colour palette and a forbidding musical score. Then there are the characters themselves. Zhenya spends most of the film before Alexey’s disappearance desperately warding off boredom. When she isn’t with Anton, her new partner, or gossiping with acquaintances, she is buried deep in her phone. Zvyagintsev devotes ample time showing her scrolling aimlessly. Is she looking for something in there while running away from her situation, frantically scrolling away lest she find what she is looking for? In a particularly devastating scene, she admits to Anton that she wanted to abort her son. The scene concludes when she asks him whether he really loves her. But hesitation and fear underlie Zhenya’s question, as if she half-expects him not answer, terrified of what she might discover in his response. Anton, meanwhile, remains silent. This lovelessness runs like a tumour underneath the skin of the film. From Zhenya’s mother to her son, no one is spared. Bitterness is not in short supply. Nor is nonchalance. The policeman investigating the case suggests that the parents request a private search and rescue team of volunteers for help. The police simply doesn’t have the time nor the patience in a land where murders and rapes abound. During interviews, the parents appear clueless about their son’s private life. With no friends and no love, it is as if Alexey simply didn’t exist. And how could someone that never existed disappear. Zvyagintsev shows him sparingly, almost tricking the audience into forgetting about him too. Until he is thrust back into the conversation and the screen, before his disappearance finally turns Alexey into the giant elephant in the country-sized room. Finally, everybody is forced to look for him when he isn’t there. As stated earlier, Zvyagintsev never forgets him. He ensures the audience takes Alexey with them as they exit the theatre. The characters may be too busy staring blankly into television screens, half-opiate with the omnipresent violence and injustice, sleeping with open eyes. Hope may be in short supply. But, Zvyagintsev reminds us, it is there, if we only care to look. There, underneath the snow that covers everything with a shiny, glittering coat, mixed with the grit and the soil. Pressed tightly between compliance and indifference, like a twig patiently waiting for a stray sunbeam to melt the snow.