Butler's Cinema Scene

Maryana Spivak

“LOVELESS” My rating: B 

127 minutes | MPAA rating: R

As if his Oscar-winning “Leviathan” didn’t take enough of  a withering look at contemporary Russia, writer/director Andrey Zvyagintsev now gives us “Loveless,” a film that lives up to its name in more ways than one.

It begins with 12-year-old Alyosha (Matey Novikov ) wandering through a forested park on his way home from school.  He’s in no hurry, and once we get to the apartment where he lives we can see why.

His parents, Boris (Aleksey Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), are in the last spasms of a hateful breakup.  Both have new lovers, and neither wants to see his/her style cramped by the presence of a pre-teen — especially one described by his own mother as “constantly whining.”

Of course, we can’t blame the kid for weeping in the privacy of his room, from which he can hear his parents discussing his future: first boarding school, then the army.  At least that way they won’t have to worry about taking heat from social workers.

As for their son:  “He’ll get used to it.”

What kind of people are these?  Well, that’s the questions “Loveless” addresses, even if definitive answers aren’t forthcoming.  One thing soon becomes clear…this isn’t young Alyosha’s story. He’s a peripheral player,  absent for most of the film.

Instead we follow Boris to his place of employment, a corporation run by a Christian fundamentalist who demands that his male employees all be family men — one desk jockey grimly jokes that the place operates under “Russian Orthodox Sharia law.”

We discover that Boris has impregnated his girlfriend (she’s young, insecure, and no doubt would feel threatened having Alyosha about).  Zhenya, meanwhile, is seeing a slightly older man who, if his apartment is any indication, is working his way up Russia’s oligarchical ladder.

These two are so absorbed with their own pursuits and pleasures that some time passes  before they realize that their son is missing. His teacher reports he hasn’t come to class for two days.

Matey Novikov

The bulk of “Loveless” is an almost documentary-style procedural.  The cops view tracking down runaways as a low prioriy, so Alyosha’s bickering parents turn to a  volunteer group dedicated to finding missing kids.  Dozens of searchers scour abandoned buildings and wooded areas, recovering only Alyosha’s abandoned backpack.

Hoping the kid may have turned to his grandmother in a town three hours away, Boris and Zhenya go to visit her mother.  It doesn’t take long for us to figure out the origins of  Zhenya’s casual cruelty and selfishness — her mother oozes those qualities like an oversaturated bathroom sponge.

Solving the mystery of what has happened to Alyosha isn’t really Zvyagintsev’s goal.  He’s aiming for something more intangible and subtle.

“Leviathan” was, on one level, about the corruption of post-Soviet society and how the rights of individuals are abrogated by church and state.

“Loveless” takes a look at how the ethos of Russia’s new capitalist era has infected the human spirit. Those motivated by mostly by greed are doing fine; those with more humane inclinations are lost and foundering.  For far too many Russians, this film argues, humane inclinations are viewed as an anachronistic leftover of an old order.

|Robert W. Butler