Film Screening and Q&A Review: Loveless at Broadway Cinema

Mother Russia pounds the treadmill, going nowhere. Alyosha, her son, has been missing for two years or more. War ravages the suffering people of eastern Ukraine.

The closing minutes of Loveless, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s new film, pull together some diverse threads of this tough portrayal of contemporary Russia. A twelve-year-old boy vanishes from the disintegrating family home in suburban Moscow. It is the family that is disintegrating, not the sought-after apartment. Alyosha sobs quietly, hidden behind a door, as his parents argue. When his mother, Zhenya, finally discovers that Alyosha is missing, the police rule out “foul play” by the parents, advising that most children return within seven to ten days. The policeman recommends contacting a volunteer organisation which specialises in searching for missing people. Thereupon, Ivan, the “co-ordinator”, takes capable charge.

Director Zvyagintsev and producer Aleksandr Rodnyansky attended a preview screening of Loveless at Nottingham’s Broadway on 30 January, prior to the film’s general release on 9 February. Zvyagintsev explained that a volunteer search group emerged spontaneously in Russia in 2012 in response to the tragic disappearance of a young girl, who was later found dead. This civil society initiative continues its work, tracing more than 80% of those it is asked to seek. Coincidentally, 2012 was when the mass demonstrations against the prevailing political order in Russia were at their peak. Apathy his since taken hold.

Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Oleg Negin chose to link people volunteering to help find missing persons, a positive manifestation of civil society, with the ugliest face of divorce after an extended period of loveless marriage. A universal theme, this telling has a particular Russian irony, with the grandmother transmogrified into a venomous she-devil. No smiling babushka she! The men are mainly ineffectual, if fecund. The women are fertile and busy. What has become of Russia’s love of its children, often noted during Soviet times? Similarly, has the famed intimacy and closeness of domestic life during the Soviet period been lost to the generations that have followed?

Zvyagintsev’s prize-winning film Leviathan unfolded on the coast of northern Russia, unfrozen by global warming. The changing seasons colour Loveless only a little, with sunshine replacing winter grey as Alyosha walks home from school through the woods. This short passage provides the link with the closing sequence, leaving key questions unanswered; a characteristic hook in Zvyagintsev’s storytelling, as Rodnyansky explained, which keeps the audience thinking about the film.

Thomas Hobbes, author of Leviathan, his timeless study of power, moulders in Ault Hucknall church, some twenty miles north of Nottingham. Hobbes’ philosophy of “each against all” grew from the brutality and mountainous death toll of the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century. The world continues to struggle with the passions Hobbes identified. Yet, he himself enjoyed “prick song” on return from the pub to his quarters at Hardwick Hall, where he was tutor to sons of the nobility. The season of love, happiness and creative fulfilment is long awaited.

Loveless was previewed at Broadway Cinema on Tuesday 30 January and will be on general release from Friday 9 February 2018.

Broadway Cinema website