OVP: Loveless (2017)

Film: Loveless (2017)
Stars: Maryana Spivak, Aleksey Rozin, Matvei Novikov, Alexey Fateev
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Russia)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

For reasons that are largely inexplicable to me, I have finished all of the OVP movies from 2004-19, but have not been able to get this done for 2017 yet, even though I work backwards.  While I won't have completed the year with the movies published this week, we'll get to two of the films that kept me from hitting this goal for a long while in the coming days, the first of which is today.  Loveless is one of several recent Russian hits with the category (in the past six years, four of the Russian submissions were either nominated or shortlisted for the Oscar).  Like many of the other nominated films, the movie has to navigate a steady hand in showing a truly modern Russia while also getting past Putin's authoritarian gaze, not an easy task but one that Loveless navigates well.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is a tale of divorce, and the child in its wake.  12-year-old Aloysha (Novikov) is stuck between two bitter parents who loathe each other, Zhenya (Spivak) & Boris (Rozin), but who are stuck together until they can sell their apartment.  They are cruel, involved with themselves (they both have moved on to other romantic relationships), and one night Aloysha hears that they are considering giving him up to an orphanage as neither wants him.  The next day, both parents realize that Aloysha is missing, potentially having run away.  The police and a search-and-rescue team begin to look for the young boy, with the parents thrown together one last time as they look for the child they never really wanted, and continue to snipe at each other viciously.  When the police find a body of a mutilated child, the parents deny that it's Aloysha, but understand that there is a cruelty in their lives & break down crying over their ruined lives (and possibly their son's disappearance).

I say possibly because the ending of Loveless is kind of what makes the film.  Up until this point it is an extremely well-acted movie, one that doesn't quite hit its marks early on, but once it starts to underline the selfishness involved with these two people (and the reality that they're human-not everyone is made to be a parent, and these two certainly weren't), we see a flash-forward several years to Boris living with his girlfriend and their son, whom he doesn't care for & is distant toward, and Zhenya moving in with her rich older boyfriend.  In both of their lives, there's little indication that they missed Aloysha at all, and the only remnants of him are faded "Missing Child" posters & a piece of tape he threw into a tree in the film's opening scenes, a sign that he existed even if his parents no longer include space for him in their lives or memories.

This is a rough movie.  It shows the nastiness of modern life, with us more in-tune with our electronic devices than with other human beings (there are lots of scenes of Zhenya & Boris focusing on laptops or phones or televisions rather than their children), and one that doesn't provide easy answers.  We never get a full explanation as to what happened to Aloysha.  There is some hope in the idea that he is still out there with the tape, or that he was well-hidden by his grandmother (there's a tense showdown between Zhenya & her mother about halfway through the film), but the reality is that he's most likely either the boy on that table (the parents in denial), or will be, and the scary/bleak thing is that these people don't change.  We want to assume the best in people, but in 2020 we see that this isn't always the case, and Zvyagintsev's relentless peering into this world shows that karmic retribution doesn't always find the worst among us.