If hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, the women of Loveless make clear how, for scorned women, the world itself is its own form of hell. Russian filmmaker Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest work offers a bleak tale about the dissolution of relationships in modern-day Russia, in which one couple’s petty battle is woven into a broader commentary on the alienation of contemporary life. A woman mindlessly scrolls through photos of her friends on her smartphone; the splendour of the curated scenes in this virtual world is only matched by the mind-numbing mediocrity of the real-life kitchen-sink melodrama that unfolds around her. A man spends his days at his unfulfilling desk job hunched over a computer screen, only resting to make superficial chat with his colleagues while being herded, cattle-like, around the office cafeteria. A young boy, caught in the cross hairs of a marital rift, weeps alone behind closed doors.
Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) are a middle-aged couple living in Moscow with their twelve-year-old son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov). The two married young, a hasty decision made upon Zhenya’s unplanned pregnancy. Loveless opens to the unhappy couple twelve years into their marriage. They are getting a divorce. The couple already enjoy new lives with new partners – Boris has a heavily pregnant, younger and blonder girlfriend; Zhenya, an older, richer lover. Time has made the two resent each other to the point of pure hatred – every word exchanged between the two is dipped in poison, simmering with a hard-edged resentment that can only ever exist between people who were once in love. Both are desperate to cast off their marital shackles and start new lives. And yet, hampering their ability to begin afresh is the very reason for their conjugal union in the first place: their shy and tortured son Alyosha, who is increasingly worried about his role in his parents’ new lives.
Sensing his impending obsolescence, Alyosha runs away, thus sparking the germinal drama of Loveless. Zhenya and Boris set off on a journey to find their son. The search takes them to abandoned tower blocks, snow-covered forests, and the homes of prickly parents long-abandoned. And yet, those familiar with Zvyagintsev’s work will know better than to expect a revitalised meet-cute, in which old passions are once again rediscovered by the couple, and former charms brought forth anew. The barren landscape of Moscow in the Winter reflects the chilling and unforgiving emotional tenor of Loveless: do not expect to find any miraculous warmth here.
The casual cruelty that can arise in romantic relationships is on full display in Loveless, richly illustrated in the characterisations of Zhenya and Boris. They are both unlikeable. Boris is a cowardly, spineless man, content to be passively buffeted by the social forces around him, leaving the rest of the world – and more pointedly, the women who sleep with him – as the victims of his carelessness. Zhenya is bitter, hardened woman, often cruel and vindictive to the people around her. It is a distinctly gendered dynamic. The bumbling man who fumbles about thoughtlessly in a world catered towards him, insulated with the knowledge that there will be a woman to pick up the pieces. The long-suffering woman, hardened through years of being an emotional handmaiden to men, now determined to make the world as ugly for everyone as it was – and still is – to her. In their respective bitterness, both Zhenya and Boris desperately pursue their fantasy worlds featuring their new lovers, in an effort to create a space impervious to the corrupting factors of time, emotional maturation, and other people. But sometimes self-absorption can be more hurtful than intentional malice: at least in the latter, someone’s still paying attention.
Yet it is unclear in Loveless where Zvyagintsev’s sympathies lie, or the broader point it is attempting to make about gender relations, power (im)balances, and casual cruelty. Boris’s antipathy is positioned as a neutral equivalent alongside Zhenya’s spitefulness, with little sense of how the two failings relate and intersect. The result is a flattened, one-dimensional landscape of misanthropy, with little sense of where generosity ends and meanness begins. It is true that people are terrible to one another, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not. And yet it is also true that this malice often has its own journey, spurred on, tempered, and extinguished by the forces around it. Loveless drops hints of the backstory behind this couple’s respective displeasures, but stops shy of offering a narratorial journey for these frustrations as they develop. As Zhenya and Boris physically flit from place to place in the search for their son, their emotional states remain frozen like wintry ground beneath them; the result is a sticky, almost claustrophobic air of hopeless misanthropy.
Musing about the uses of art, Roland Barthes observed “an artist has to know that he is entirely responsible for the end point he assigns to his explanations – there is always a moment at which art freezes the world, and the latest possible moment is the best”.¹ The theorist invites us to take the example of the ‘drunk peasant’, a trope commonly used in literature: “the peasants drink. Why do they drink?” Is it because they are sad? Like alcohol? Are seeking an escape? Good art denaturalises that which is considered natural, unveiling the hidden symbols and latent truths underlying the commonplace; and the beauty to be found in such a discovery. In Loveless, people are cruel, and life is hopeless. But why? Finding the ‘end point’ of the drama in Loveless is like an exercise in infinite regression, where hopelessness and decay cling to every layer of the movie’s purview: family, workplace, and nation. Boris hears about a colleague who hired actresses to act as his wife and daughters at an office party. Zhenya’s beautician tells her of a boss who fired his employees for refusing to go on a ski trip. Narratives of the Mayan apocalypse and the invasion of Ukraine blare on Boris’s radio and television. It is unclear where one arrives at the end of Loveless’s logical string, if there is an ‘end point’ at all.
Loveless has been received in the West to widespread acclaim, and critics are right to point to the searing and moving emotional heart of the film, no matter how hard it may be to watch. And yet, perhaps we are not as far removed from Loveless’s universe as we might think. Reviews have taken particular interest in the film’s Russian origins, with some ham-fistedly harnessing the film to indict the nation itself: culture magazine Vulture, for example, proclaims that the ‘Loveless Will Make You Happy You Don’t Live in Russia (Yet)’. It is undeniable that Zvyagintsev was inspired by the moral and social circumstances of contemporary Russia; he himself has confirmed as much. However, there is criticism from within, and criticism from without. The former inspires generosity and self-reflection of one’s own circumstances; the latter, self-satisfied moralising from above. Narcissistic parents, alienating workplaces, and illegal invasions of other nations are not a distinctly Russian phenomenon. Perhaps in his jarring indictment of the human proclivity to find division in the universally felt, Zvyagintsev enjoys the last laugh.
¹ Roland Barthes, ‘Cinema, Right and Left’ in Signs and Images. Writings on Art, Cinema and Photography, University of Chicago Press, 2016
