Post by Dracula on Mar 24, 2018 15:30:17 GMT -5
Loveless(3/18/2018)
Despite being a major world power Russia really doesn’t have the strongest filmmaking legacy. That the country was run by a totalitarian government that suppressed free speech for much of the 20th Century almost certainly had something to do with this. There aren’t too many movements or collectives you hear about in Russian film, rather there tends to be one dominant figure who acts as the standout Russian filmmaker in any given era whether it’s Eisenstein in the 20s and 30s or Andrei Tarkovsky in the 60s and 70s or Nikita Mikhalkov in the 90s. For the 2000s and 2010s the most acclaimed Russian filmmaker, by a fairly wide margin, is Andrey Zvyagintsev. Zvyagintsev is not necessarily the most popular figure with Russia’s Ministry of Culture but he consistently proves more popular than his countrymen at film festivals and has a solid following in the West and would likely be even more widely discussed if people knew how to pronounce his name. His reputation has only expanded with the release of his latest film Loveless, which did quite well at Cannes and which was also one of the 2017 nominees for Best Foreign Language film.
Loveless looks at a rather unpleasant married couple who have already resolved to divorce as the film begins. The husband, Boris (Aleksey Rozin), has apparently been having an affair with a younger woman named Masha (Marina Vasilyeva) who is already pregnant with his child while the wife, Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), has been having an affair with an older man named Anton (Andris Keišs) who she considers much more gentlemanly than Boris. Caught in the middle of all this is their twelve year old boy Alexey (Matvey Novikov), who is often ignored and neglected as his parents fight among themselves. One day the parents realize that their son has disappeared and may have been gone for a couple of days without them having noticed. Receiving little help from the police the two find themselves hiring some sort of private investigator to help track down the kid but their internal conflicts continue to plague both of them.
Andrey Zvyagintsev started his in the early 2000s with a film called The Return and has continued to make a number of intentionally cold little slices of life that feel meditative while still telling stories and having plots that can be grasped. His last film, Leviathan, was something of a departure in that it had more of a streak of satire, albeit of the pitch black variety, and had more of an allegorical level. His new film, Loveless is a bit of a return to the style of something like Elena which simply takes an artful look into the abyss of bourgeois existence. As usual Zvyagintsev films the movie by making great use of a still frame and giving the whole thing a sort of artful gaze. It’s kind of like what David Fincher’s films would look like if he worked on less commercial projects and generally slowed things down a little. Zvyagintsev also makes great use of these Moscow locations which certainly don’t seem to be lacking in money but which are still rather desolate and kind of depressing.
One of the film’s producers has said the movie was about “Russian life, Russian society and Russian anguish” but despite that quote I do think people are being a little reductive when they look at the whole movie in terms of its Russian origins and reductively call it a movie about how unpleasant that country can be. After all, there are loveless marriages and missing children everywhere and I think the film does tap into a type of malaise which exists far beyond Moscow. The film also shouldn’t be mistaken for some sort of argument for traditional family values as the movie is careful to also critique the society the way society pressured them into marrying when young and how it continued to keep them together despite obvious incompatibility. There’s an odd sub-plot in which Boris is told by a colleague that his Christian fundamentalist bosses require that all the employees at their company be married with children and will fire him if its learned he’s divorcing, a policy which is pretty clearly only leading everyone involved to misery, but the problems these two people are facing are bigger than this of course and the film offers little hope at the end that their separation will really solve all their problems. That general air of miserableness is not going to endear the film to all audiences, and as with most Zvyagintsev I find I probably respect it more than I love it, but it’s hard to deny it’s a strong piece.
**** out of Five
Despite being a major world power Russia really doesn’t have the strongest filmmaking legacy. That the country was run by a totalitarian government that suppressed free speech for much of the 20th Century almost certainly had something to do with this. There aren’t too many movements or collectives you hear about in Russian film, rather there tends to be one dominant figure who acts as the standout Russian filmmaker in any given era whether it’s Eisenstein in the 20s and 30s or Andrei Tarkovsky in the 60s and 70s or Nikita Mikhalkov in the 90s. For the 2000s and 2010s the most acclaimed Russian filmmaker, by a fairly wide margin, is Andrey Zvyagintsev. Zvyagintsev is not necessarily the most popular figure with Russia’s Ministry of Culture but he consistently proves more popular than his countrymen at film festivals and has a solid following in the West and would likely be even more widely discussed if people knew how to pronounce his name. His reputation has only expanded with the release of his latest film Loveless, which did quite well at Cannes and which was also one of the 2017 nominees for Best Foreign Language film.
Loveless looks at a rather unpleasant married couple who have already resolved to divorce as the film begins. The husband, Boris (Aleksey Rozin), has apparently been having an affair with a younger woman named Masha (Marina Vasilyeva) who is already pregnant with his child while the wife, Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), has been having an affair with an older man named Anton (Andris Keišs) who she considers much more gentlemanly than Boris. Caught in the middle of all this is their twelve year old boy Alexey (Matvey Novikov), who is often ignored and neglected as his parents fight among themselves. One day the parents realize that their son has disappeared and may have been gone for a couple of days without them having noticed. Receiving little help from the police the two find themselves hiring some sort of private investigator to help track down the kid but their internal conflicts continue to plague both of them.
Andrey Zvyagintsev started his in the early 2000s with a film called The Return and has continued to make a number of intentionally cold little slices of life that feel meditative while still telling stories and having plots that can be grasped. His last film, Leviathan, was something of a departure in that it had more of a streak of satire, albeit of the pitch black variety, and had more of an allegorical level. His new film, Loveless is a bit of a return to the style of something like Elena which simply takes an artful look into the abyss of bourgeois existence. As usual Zvyagintsev films the movie by making great use of a still frame and giving the whole thing a sort of artful gaze. It’s kind of like what David Fincher’s films would look like if he worked on less commercial projects and generally slowed things down a little. Zvyagintsev also makes great use of these Moscow locations which certainly don’t seem to be lacking in money but which are still rather desolate and kind of depressing.
One of the film’s producers has said the movie was about “Russian life, Russian society and Russian anguish” but despite that quote I do think people are being a little reductive when they look at the whole movie in terms of its Russian origins and reductively call it a movie about how unpleasant that country can be. After all, there are loveless marriages and missing children everywhere and I think the film does tap into a type of malaise which exists far beyond Moscow. The film also shouldn’t be mistaken for some sort of argument for traditional family values as the movie is careful to also critique the society the way society pressured them into marrying when young and how it continued to keep them together despite obvious incompatibility. There’s an odd sub-plot in which Boris is told by a colleague that his Christian fundamentalist bosses require that all the employees at their company be married with children and will fire him if its learned he’s divorcing, a policy which is pretty clearly only leading everyone involved to misery, but the problems these two people are facing are bigger than this of course and the film offers little hope at the end that their separation will really solve all their problems. That general air of miserableness is not going to endear the film to all audiences, and as with most Zvyagintsev I find I probably respect it more than I love it, but it’s hard to deny it’s a strong piece.
**** out of Five
