Loveless

The opening and closing montages — barren skeletal trees in a grey frozen wasteland — set the film’s emotional tone. As you may (or not) infer from the title, this is a loveless family.

Zhenya felt no love from her still venomous mother. To escape her she married Boris, the man she didn’t love but who impregnated her. Zhenya still resents her 12-year-old son Alyosha and his father. Zhenya and Boris occupy the same apartment as they plan their divorce. Neither wants Alyosha, s troubled, predictably insecure boy, so they plan to send him to an orphanage. 

Zhenya and Boris are already deep in new affairs. They are reunited in rage and mutual recrimination when Alyosha disappears. 

His mystery is never solved. He remains only that streamer still fluttering in the dead tree to which he launched it. Like the boy, it’s a fragile wisp of life and colour once rejected, still haunting. 

Zhenya, ensconced in her luxurious new lover’s flat, may be trying to erase his memory as she stolidly runs on her out door treadmill, in her “Russia” sweats. Her sweaty desperation may be emotional, not physical. 

Boris has a new wife, another suffocating family life, another irritating infant son. He may indeed be fulfilling his new love’s prediction — that he’ll dismiss his second love and family as he did his first. 

  Both parents are jolted out of their complacency when they see the horrible remains of a young corpse that might have been their Alyosha but isn’t. It’s perhaps the only moment we can feel empathy for them. Till we see Zhenya’s response, to assault Boris.

       The film provides some humane — if not comic — relief. The central family’s loathsomeness is countered by some astonishing kindness and care. Alyosha’s young friend is an impressive kid, faithful but caring. His father shows more natural affection than either of Alyosha’s parents or his granny did. The loveless are not the film’s only family. 

The police are … The State. Brusque, officious, they are only as considerate as they can take the time and effort to be. But they do direct Zhenya to a genuinely impressive human community, the horde of volunteers who have trained themselves to seek, to recover and to care for whoever has disappeared. These volunteers embody the lost ideal of socialism, of human collaboration. Boris and Zhenya resist their example.

As in his Leviathan, director Andrey Zvyagintsev provides a scathing view of contemporary Russian life. If the volunteers are a proper, responsible human community, the other characters in the background are idle flirts, drunks and partyers with no accountability or commitment. A pretty young woman on a dinner date freely gives her phone number and name to an unseen jerk who asks for it. Between these ditzes and the selfish central family Russia has lost its humanity.
The TV background news amplifies this theme. Initially the news is about Russian political arguments and jockeying. But at the end it reports the horrors of the Ukrainian civilians suffering under Russian attack. The woman articulates an anger and sense of abandonment that little Alyosha’s silent scream could only suggest,