LOVELESS


Having missed reviewing the Russian film “Loveless” when it was released last November, I’m belatedly catching up with it as it goes into well-deserved wider release. Directed impressively by Andrey Zvyagintsev, the film poignantly examines the plight of a 12-year-old, Alyosha, played by Matvey Novikov, and in the process tells us something of contemporary Russia.

Poor Alyosha. He already experiences the coldness of growing up regarded a nuisance by his parents, Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) and Boris (Alexey Rozin), who hate each other and are moving on to other relationships. To make matters worse, he devastatingly overhears a conversation between his father and mother in which they talk of divorce and plans to put him in an orphanage.

What is Alyosha to do? The boy decides to run away. It takes a bit of time for his parents to even realize that he hasn’t come home from school and report him to the police as missing. What follows reveals that the authorities have so many such reports that they are slow to take serious action. Overworked and understaffed, they rely on volunteer groups to do the searching.

One such group is called upon in Alyosha’s case. There is one sympathetic person who takes the boy’s disappearance to heart—Ivan (Aleksey Fateev), director of the volunteers and a decent human being.

The bleak but sensitive film by implication reflects what must be the situation for other Alyoshas, and although it proceeds as a detective story, it is less intent on telling us what eventually happens to the young protagonist than providing a portrait of the society in which Alyosha must struggle to find his place. The director, who co-wrote the screenplay with Oleg Negin and Mikhail Krichman, succeeds admirably, and one can see why Russia designated “Loveless” as its entry into the foreign language film Oscar competition. A Sony Pictures Classics release. Reviewed February 17, 2018.




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