Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev has produced another masterpiece in this apocalyptic study of a failed marriage and the subsequent disappearance of a childAndrei Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a stark,mysterious and terrifying account of spiritual catastrophe: a drama with the ostensible form of a procedural crime thriller. It has a hypnotic intensity and unbearable ambiguity which is maintained until the very conclude. This is a account of contemporary Russia whose people are at the mercy of implacable ((adj.) incapable of being appeased or mitigated) forces, a loveless world like a planet without the full means to support human life, or a place where the ordinary need for survival has mutated or upgraded into an unending aspirational demand for status,money, freedom to find an advantageous moment marriage which brings a nice apartment, or sex,luxury and the social media prerogative of selfies and self-affirmation. But all of it is underpinned, or overseen, and by intensely conservative social norms of Christianity,conformism and nationalism. Loveless reminded me of the same director’s Elena - and it also has the unflinching moral seriousness of Bergman’s Scenes From a Marriage. The account of a disappearance which betokens some larger, metaphysical dysfunction has something of Antonioni’s L’Avventura – a film whose importance and example continues unabated – and the single, or static shot of a school about to let the pupils out may have taken something else from that other touchstone: Michael Haneke’s Hidden. The grim presence in this film of elderly mothers – secular Buddhas of reactionary cynicism who explain every sign of inducing their children to become their duplicate – reminded me of Philip Larkin’s lines about man handing on misery to man and it deepening like a coastal shelf. Related: Leviathan director Andrei Zvyagintsev: ‘Living in Russia is like being in a minefield’ Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com