Loveless

I haven't done divorce work for 25 years, but the acrid stench of that sort of litigation returned to haunt me as I viewed Andrey Zvyagintsev's 2017 film, Loveless.  When a marriage resulting in a child (or children) is dissolved, almost always one or the other parent files an affidavit to this effect:  While she (or he) spends her nights drinking and doing drugs and having wild sex, the children are completely neglected.  There is an element of brutal magical thinking that invests divorces involving children:  the happiness of the divorced parent is at the expense of the abandoned child.  This is particularly true in sexual matters.  Every orgasm inflicts any injury on the child.  After having sex with her partner, a mother involved in divorce imagines that she will scramble out of her lover's bed to discover that her child needs her, that her child is horribly sick or injured or has been kidnaped by a stranger.  This sort of destructive fantasy is common, afflicting men as well as women, and Loveless embodies this theme in a particularly cruel and relentless way.

A St. Petersburg couple, Boris and Zhenya are getting divorced.  As often happens, the two despise one another and have turned their small apartment into a battlefield.  Boris has a younger girlfriend, blonde and seemingly childlike and he has impregnated her.  Zhenya, who runs an upscale beauty salon, is involved with an oligarch, a 47-year-old man who looks like a larger, less rodent-faced Vladimir Putin and who wears polo shirts (Zvyagintsev is not a subtle film maker.)  The film's casting is brilliant:  Boris is feckless and gives the impression that he is always somewhat confused.  Zhenya has hard mask-like features; she is beautiful and inscrutable and totally self-absorbed.  The Oligarch exudes an air of very subtle menace:  he is generally extremely charming but has an aura of someone capable of any kind of savagery.  Boris' heavily pregnant girlfriend is a little blonde who uses her baby-girl demeanor to ensnare her prey -- while shopping for baby clothes, the girl's mother tells us that "all men are children and have to be told what to do."  During one particularly vicious argument, Boris and Zhenya loudly debate what to do with Alyosha, their 12 year old boy.  Boris doesn't want custody of the boy and he's obviously an inconvenience to Zhenya, interfering with her exciting new life with the Oligarch.  She says that she will simply pack the boy off to a boarding school and, then, he can enlist in the military.  The problem is that neither parent wants the child around.  In fact, Zhenya recalls bitterly that she married Boris because he got her pregnant and that she should have aborted the child and ended the relationship -- "do you think it will be any different with your new girlfriend who you've got pregnant?" she cries.  We see Alyosha hiding in the bathroom, wracked with sobbing.  He crawls into bed in his little room still weeping inconsolably.

The film's next section consists of two extended sex scenes.  Boris goes home to his girlfriend's apartment -- her mother is absent -- and has sex with the little blonde.  Zvyagintsev films these scenes in darkened rooms with monochrome autumn landscapes pressing in at the windows and the imagery is quite explicit.  The little blonde's heavily pregnant silhouette looms against the snowy, grey vistas and the dim, airless rooms.  After a meal at an expensive restaurant, Zhenya goes to the Oligarch's apartment and has sex with him -- his apartment is a dark labyrinth of floating mirrors and glass walls opening out onto wintry woods.  The light is vaguely greenish.  With both couples, the sex is better than satisfactory -- it's  inventive and great with mutual and simultaneous orgasms.  Zhenya stands naked at glass window, cooling herself after all this lovemaking -- she looks like a fin-de-siècle vampire with absinthe-colored highlights under her throat and between her breasts.  Her boyfriend comes up behind her and initiates more sex.  Later, we see her at her home slipping between the sheets in her own bed, luxuriating in the chance to simply sleep in the cool bed -- but, before, she closes her eyes, she checks her cell-phone and smiles because her boyfriend has apparently sent her a tender or erotic message.  What she does not do is look in Alyosha's bedroom to see if her son is okay.  Later, she gets a call from school -- Alyosha as been missing now for two days.  Where is he?  Who was minding the child during all of this sex?

The rest of the film involves the search for the missing boy.  The police are useless and so a local search and rescue club is deployed to hunt through the woods and the river bottoms for the missing boy.  Boris and Zhenya are forced together to travel to see her mother, the boy's grandmother in a suburb of Moscow.  Boris calls the woman "Stalin in skirts" and she is a nightmarish monster -- the visit to her deteriorates into a horrible fight between mother and daughter.  On the way back to St. Petersburg, Boris and Zhenya quarrel so violently that he throws her out of his car on particularly desolate stretch of barren steppe.  In an American film, the missing boy would be an occasion for the divorcing couple to renew their bonds or, at least, declare a truce -- not so in Zvyagintsev's unsparing and relentless film.  The last time we see the couple together, Zhenya lunges at Boris, beats and claws him, and leaves him bloody and sobbing on the floor of a squalid morgue where they have come to view a badly mutilated corpse.

Zvyagintsev on the evidence of this film and his prior works, The Return, Elena, and Leviathan, is unsparing moralist.  The film is packed with little allegorical or symbolic details.  At the expensive restaurant, the hostess gives the camera her phone number signifying her sexual availability -- it's a tiny, surreal detail.  The trackers looking for Alyosha search through  decomposing Communist era buildings -- they have a sort of Stalinist Art  Deco style and are half-flooded:  conference halls and a ballroom and ruinous natatorium with scaling paint on the walls.  The search through these buildings, of course, invokes Tarkovsky, particularly the scenes in Nostalghia in which the hero has to walk the length of a drained swimming pool in a ruin somewhere.  (And the cellar of the rotting structure is half-flooded -- one of Tarkovsky's nightmare landscapes of collapsing architecture and pools of murky water.)  Images of the search parties in bright orange vests marching through the colorless grey and brown forests are beautifully composed and there is one breathtaking shot of a huge radar facility, the decrepit dish  half-covered in mildew, with silvery birch trees in the foreground -- as in an Antonioni film, we have seen this installation through the windows of the family's apartment.  On the radio, a voice warns us that according to the Mayan calendar the end of the world is approaching but that this is disinformation intended to add "to the seasonal melancholy as Winter is approaching and inspire people to desperate acts such as crime and suicide."  Zvyagintsev is a master film maker on all levels and he inspires his rather dim-witted and heavily judgmental parable with an implacable sense of dread and horror.  In bed, the pregnant blonde bites into an apple like Eve in the Garden of Eden.  Zhenya looks indifferent, glamorously beautiful, and somehow sinister and serpentine.  Boris works for some sort of religious organization, possibly as a fundraiser --  at his offices we see an image of a Russian Orthodox church that is literally plated with gold leaf.  His boss nicknamed "Beardy" requires that all workers be married and have children -- this is a mandate, so-called Orthodox fundamentalism.  Boris wonders if he can substitute one family for another without Beardy knowing the difference.  A police captain investigating Alyosha's disappearance speaks in an absurdly deep basso profundo voice, a tone that the film has to engineer as a special effect -- it's the harsh, critical voice of God Himself.  In one astonishing scene, volunteers are posting pictures of the missing boy on lamp posts on a snowy hillside road.  We see them put up a poster on a light post and, then, walk away out of frame -- a pedestrian enters the image and hustles by the poster without looking at it and, then, goes on a path into adjacent woods where it is absolutely ink-black and, therefore, vanishes:  we hear the volunteers tearing tape to put up another poster that, perhaps, no one will take the time to read.  When  the camera lingers on the prosaic scene of a schoolteacher erasing a chalk board, the image has a powerful symbolic effect. 

To Western eyes, there is a flaw in Zvyagintsev's masterpiece.  In a late scene, the Oligarch watches TV and hears people, ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, describing war crimes visited upon them.  Within the terms of the allegory posited by Zvyagintsev, the dissolution of the Soviet Union has dispossessed the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine, making them hapless children that no one wants to acknowledge.  In effect, the director suggests that the ethnic Russians in the Ukraine are like Alyosha, made orphans by their parents' indifference (in the Ukrainian case, ignored by Mother Russia).  The extension of this alarming paradigm to the international situation seems forced and unnecessary and, even, wrong-headed if you think Ukraine deserves the right to determine its own fate.