Loveless: One of the best films you’ll see this year

WHEN this screened at Cannes almost a year ago, it was met with universal acclaim. Now Australians will finally get to see it.

WHEN Loveless screened at Cannes almost a year ago, it was met with universal acclaim.

An emotionally stark indictment of middle class malaise and the broken promises of an empire, Loveless impressed critics and audiences. It’s one of the best films you’ll see this year.

But you know who didn’t care for it? The Russian government. Loveless’ director and co-writer Andrey Zvyagintsev has been persona non grata to Vladimir Putin’s administration since his stunning 2014 film Leviathan, a powerful portrait of Russian corruption as told through the struggles of a small town mechanic. If you haven’t seen Leviathan yet, seek it out, It should be mandatory viewing.

For his follow-up, Zvyagintsev moved the action away from a small coastal community to metropolitan Moscow, and within the microcosm of one toxic family he damns the whole country. While it’s not narratively connected to Leviathan, Loveless very much shares that same mercilessly uncomfortable DNA.

Caught in the crossfire of his parents’ bitterness.

Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Aleksey Rozin) are in the middle of a poisonous divorce — they married young because of circumstance and over the years, their relationship became a turgid mess. Now they can’t stand the sight of each other, erupting into heated arguments at any slight.

While they wait to sell their apartment, the only reason to be in each other’s orbit is their son, 12-year-old Alexey (Matvey Novikov), who has to despairingly hear his parents tear each other a new one, raging about how deeply unhappy they are, which he internalises as how unhappy they are with him.

Neither adult is particularly interested in their son’s welfare, with plans to ship him to a boarding school lest he gets in the way of the new lives they’ve already set up for themselves. Their neglect of Alexey’s emotional wellbeing is stunning in its honesty.

When Zhenya returns from an overnight date and awakes the next day, she receives a phone call from her son’s school — the boy hasn’t been to class in two days. Neither parent has noticed the absence.

After a callous brush-off from the police, Zhenya and Boris turn to a local child search and rescue team, whose experience and efficiency hints at the ubiquity of teen runaways.

Loveless’ director Andrey Zvyagintsev has made an enemy of the Putin state.

While Loveless can appear as a hard film to watch, it actually flows naturally, even if every character seems unable to access any kind of emotion resembling warmth. Its colour palette of dull, grey tones — it’s as if it’s perpetually overcast, even inside — and its striking shots of dead wood or the concrete urban landscape makes for hypnotic viewing.

Zvyagintsev set the story in 2012, in the days leading up to the end of the Mayan calendar as some sort of ominous backdrop to the domestic affair. While he calls himself apolitical, there’s no mistaking his social commentary with Loveless — a middle-class family with the economic power for a comfortable life is rotting from the inside and failing the next generation.

The filmmaker is hardly subtle about this — an abandoned leisure club with its now-drained pool and decrepit ballroom acts as a potent physical symbol.

It’s hard not to see Loveless as standing in for Russia’s wider problem — of the promises of Perestroika and Glasnost and the progress reforms brought, progress that has since been diluted by divisions, apathy and a state with no soul.

Rating: ★★★★½

Loveless is in cinemas from Thursday, April 25.

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