Merciless journey into the icy heart of Mother Russia
Loveless 15 cert, 124 min ★★★★★
Dir Andrey Zvyagintsev Starring Mariana Spivak, Alexey Rozin, Matvey Novikov, Marina Vasilyeva, Andris Keishs
This pristine and merciless new film from Russia’s Andrey Zvyagintsev begins in the cold, and its temperature keeps dropping from there. The opening scene of this best foreignlanguage Oscar and Bafta nominee is a forest somewhere near St Petersburg: bare and twisted trees claw at the banks of a black river and snow descends like dust. Into this fairy-tale setting wanders a child: it is 12-year-old Alyosha (Matvey Novikov), who leaves school with a smile on his face, and wrapped in a thick red coat. Against the drab, this flash of scarlet sounds an ominous note – overtones of Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, and also Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.
At home, his parents, Boris (Alexey Rozin) and Zhenya (an outstanding Mariana Spivak), are in the middle of a bitter divorce. Both have new lovers – Boris’s is already pregnant – and though no one dares say it, it seems that Alyosha is the only thing preventing a clean break. During a night-time row, Zhenya storms out; as she pushes the door we see the boy standing silently behind it, his face clenched in grief.
The icily beautiful Zhenya runs a beauty salon and spends the evenings with her suave older boyfriend (Andris Keishs), while the dowdier Boris has found a new lover who’s more his speed. Mikhail Krichman’s camera steals into their bedrooms, and captures their lovemaking in a series of skin-prickling erotic tableaux – watch and learn, Fifty Shades – but your mind keeps being wrenched back to the boy. Where is he in all of this?
Where indeed. It’s only the second day after Alyosha goes missing that his parents notice. A policeman offhandedly reassures them: “The stats are on your side.” Even so, a volunteer group that specialises in finding missing people gets involved, and there is a mesmeric horror in watching them work: a row of orange pinpricks advancing into a grey valley, like explorers on an alien planet.
As the hunt broadens, so too do its implications. The radio news warns of an increase in “apocalyptic sentiments” among the population. Her face set in stone, Zhenya jogs on a treadmill in the national Olympic tracksuit – a 21stcentury Mother Russia, going nowhere yet locked unswervingly on course.
A visit to Zhenya’s estranged mother makes clear the only thing that can transcend all cultural and social divides is coldness – from parent to child, state to citizen, husband to wife and back. In Zvyagintsev’s Russia, cruelties are paid back twice over in kind, and a fresh snowfall, covering everyone’s tracks, is never far away.