loveless (w&d andrey zvyagintsev, w oleg negin)

Loveless, watched in the company of Mr W on Valentine’s night, is another rigorous, absorbing film from Zvyagintsev. It offers a portrayal of Russian society that has a muted ferocity. The film’s narrative revolves around the disappearance and subsequent search for Alyosha, the 12 year old son of Boris and Zhenya, a couple on the brink of divorce, both of them now setting out on new relationships which they hope will offer them greater scope for happiness. As the narrative unfolds, we learn that Zhenya only married Boris because she became pregnant, and the reason she kept the child was that she wanted a way out from living with her tyrannical mother. The couple have fallen out of love and the one who suffers collateral damage is their son. His pain is shown in a shocking reveal as he hides whilst his parents engage in yet another cruel argument.

This may be social realism, but Zvyagintsev’s palette is epic, rather than parochial. Firstly, the narrative is permitted to wander. Where the child’s disappearance might have been the immediate focal point of a British version of this story, Zvyagintsev enters into two lengthy sequences showing both parents with their new lovers. The understated camerawork, which uses a slow, creeping zoom to emphasise the sense of us spying on these people as they go about their business, (and perhaps suggests the ghost of their son), registers both characters with a devastating honesty. They are given time and space to say what they think, to the point of damning themselves. Minimal gestures give them away. Rarely has the process of capturing a selfie been made to seem quite so pernicious or revealing of the innate narcissism of modern society.  

Then, as the film shifts to the mechanisms of Alyosha’s disappearance, there’s no attempt made to sugar the pill. There are redemptive figures in this bleak story, namely the volunteer helpers who assist the parents in their search. It’s not hard to think that a British version of the story might have focussed on their POV, as the only sympathetic voices. Zvyagintsev refrains from this option. Instead, he focuses on the parents’ gradual disintegration, which is also a gradual journey towards humanity. A limited humanity, which offers little consolation, but something, all the same. 

The narrative might be harsh and relentless, but given the subject matter, why shouldn’t it be? The aesthetic approach consolidates its epic quality. This is a movie about Russian society, but it’s also a movie about the way in which humanity, with its placebo gadgets, runs the risk of drifting towards a state of engrained lovelessness as it pursues a nominal dream of material comfort. There’s a sleight-of-hand to the way in which the film effectively makes the audience accomplices in failing to realise the seriousness of Alyosha’s fate. As the twists and turns of the parents’ narratives are forefronted, it’s only much later on that the full impact of the child’s disappearance hits us, in exactly the same way as it catches up with his parents. There’s a terrible, almost religious  subtlety to the film’s construction: we are all complicit in the fate of our world’s lost children. 

elena (w&d andrei zvyagintsev; w. oleg negin)

Andrei Zvyagintsev manages to pull off the remarkable trick of creating in Elena a film which is both slight and magisterial at the same time. The film has the gravity of a 500 page novel, although the narrative itself is little more than a fable.

This tells us something about the way in which cinema works. Zvyagintsev’s attention to detail is meticulous. We seem to know every inch of the apartment Elena shares with her wealthy but dispassionate husband, Vladimir. The polished surfaces are contrasted with the bleakness of the estate where her son lives with his family. It’s the accumulation of detail which lends the film its power. The opening shot shows Vladimir’s flat through the branches of a tree. Peering more closely at the twilight frame, we notice a bird in the bottom left hand corner. The shot is repeated at the end. The metaphor is clear: this is cinema as ornithology. The filmmaker brings the same attributes of patience and a sheer appetite to watch as the bird-watcher, attributes his audience are obliged to share. There are sporadic moments of action, all the more intense for the way in which they suddenly flicker to life from a canvas which is so passive for so much of the time.

Whilst this runs the risk of sounding dull, it is in fact compelling. In the process Zvyagintsev reminds us that more than mere story-telling, cinema is also an exercise in perception. As such he gets away with the slight narrative, a cuckoo-in-the-nest tale which is tied up with all the neatness of a Chekhov short story in the film’s closing moments. One suspects there is an allegorical power to the story which resonates more in Moscow, perhaps, land of the newly minted super-rich, than it does here.

This is Zvyagintsev’s third film. I saw The Return on tv one night, chez Mr P. We had been channel hopping and came across it and found ourselves hooked, against all expectations. This is a director, in the model of his countryman, Sokurov, who knows the weight of the cinematic hammer he wields. His films have substance; the substance of life observed and related with a painstaking yet exhilarating precision.