BLEAK RUSSIA TALE, EDGE
‘Loveless’ director reflects on Russian epidemic of missing persons
NEW YORK — Nominated for an Academy Award tonight as this year’s best foreign language film, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Loveless” is a bleak portrait of Russia as a soulless, corrupt state.
The writer-director’s focus is Boris and Zhenya, a toxic couple in the middle of a bitter divorce with neither wanting custody of their 12-year-old son, Alyosha. The boy cries when he hears their arguments.
He also knows they each have lovers — his father’s mistress is pregnant.
Alyosha disappears — and it takes days before his parents even realize he’s missing. The police are ineffective. A volunteer group arrives to help search; so many are missing in Russia it’s a national issue.
How does this filmmaker, now a two-time Oscar nominee after his 2014 “Leviathan,” get away with this critical look at his homeland?
“As the great Russian poet Pushkin said, ‘I deeply despise my homeland but if a foreigner tells me about it, I will defend it.’ I wanted to make a genuine story of human beings,” said Zvyagintsev, 54, speaking through a translator at the Langham Hotel. “This film was not made as a portrait for a foreign market. It was made for the Russians — so that they could have a hard look at themselves and possibly find some kind of wake-up call and spiritual improvement.
“The fact that this picture traveled abroad,” he said, referring to its Cannes world premiere last May, “and gets such a tremendous reaction from all sorts of audience means that it does not tell an exotic story, but one that has elements in all societies.
“When you look inside a human being and the nature of his heart, the more universal this story becomes.”
Missing children are part of a nationwide problem in Russia. “My story began from reading about the network of volunteers who give up their free time to search for missing people, not just children. In 2016, there were 6,150 requests for finding lost people through this organization.
“One thousand were children and the success rate was 89 percent. This organization has such a staggering success result and absolutely no support from the state or relatives of the missing.
“With no connection with the authorities, it’s disliked by the police, who see themselves as law enforcement, and all of a sudden here are these strange people dressed in orange doing all this work — with more success than them.”
(“Loveless” opens Friday.)