Loveless (film)

Loveless (Nelyubov) 2017 [ Official Trailer ] Andrey Zvyagintsev ...

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Loveless (Russian: ????????) is a 2017 Russian drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. The story concerns two separated parents living apart whose affections are long forgotten and whose relationship has become loveless. They are temporarily brought together after their only young child becomes a missing person and they attempt to find him.

The film was shot in Moscow, with international support after the Russian government disapproved of Zvyagintsev's 2014 film Leviathan. Loveless opened to critical acclaim and it won the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

Video Loveless (film)

Plot

In Moscow, at the end of the school day, students are departing on their way home. One twelve year old boy, Alexey, decides to take an indirect path home rather than using the regular city streets. Alexey takes a path which leads him to walk by a local river in a wooded area just on the outskirts of town. He appears to be in no particular rush to get home. His parents, Zhenya and Boris, are in the midst of obtaining a divorce, with much animosity. They are portrayed as having divergent and incompatible personalities, she is demonstrative and self-indulgent visiting salons and beauticians, while he is reserved and self-controlled. Both are trying to form new lives in new relationships.

One day, it is discovered that the boy has disappeared from home, and his mother calls the police for assistance. At first, the police see this as the simple case of a runaway child and expect the boy to return home within a day or two. However, when Alexey does not return, then another supervisor takes over the case and promptly initiates a preliminary search for the boy by sending the parents to estranged relatives in the hope of locating him. They are first sent to see if Alexey is at his mother's parents. Alexey is not there when they arrive, though their trip to visit her mother out of town is punctuated by tension between the estranged relatives and Boris is verbally berated and excoriated by Zhenya. On the return trip home, her verbal abuse escalates to the point that Boris discharges her on the rural roadway before they get back to town.

The failure of the police to find Alexey promptly escalates the search for him into an all out emergency missing persons search across the town and surrounding areas. A search of an abandoned municipal building from an old dilapidated city development project where Alexey was known to have visited turns up nothing. Finally, the parents are asked to come to the morgue to examine and try to identify the remains of a John Doe child of still unknown identity. The parents both deny that the disfigured dead child's body is their son, though the experience of being put through the identification process is emotionally traumatic to them as they breakdown in tears of desperation, with Alexey still missing.

Later, Alexey's mother has sold their apartment and workers begin dismantling wall hangings and appliances left behind in the now vacant apartment. Outside on the street, missing person posters of Alexey now canvas large parts of the city trying to seek help in locating the missing boy. The scene shifts to the nearby river by the wooded path which Alexey used to use to walk home after school and the view focuses on an extended landscape scene looking through naked winter branches of the surrounding very tall trees. The tree branches sway slightly against the winter sky with no sight of Alexey or anyone else among the naked winter branches.

Maps Loveless (film)

Cast

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Production

Development

Producer Alexander Rodnyansky said the film was envisioned as a reflection "Russian life, Russian society and Russian anguish", but meant to be relatable to other countries. Rodnyansky also said a starting point in the story's conception was a desire to look at a family, and that director and screenwriter Andrey Zvyagintsev started forming the story while visiting the United States in 2015. Zvyagintsev also claimed it as initially an attempt to remake Scenes from a Marriage, the 1973 miniseries by Ingmar Bergman.

While Zvyagintsev claimed not to be very interested in politics, his story reflects his belief that "The modern-day police don't care about people". He chose to start the story in October 2012, because he said that was a point when the Russian people were optimistic about beneficial political reform, ending in disappointment in 2015. The film also includes references to military intervention in Ukraine. Loveless was made with no financial support from the national government, as the Ministry of Culture disapproved of Zvyagintsev's 2014 film Leviathan, about corruption in Russia. Instead, Rodnyansky successfully appealed to wealthy Russian Gleb Fetisov and foreign companies, including Why Not Productions in France and Les Films du Fleuve in Belgium, for finances.

Filming

Principal photography began in Summer 2016. The film was shot only in Moscow, on location, in apartments and an unused building to portray the search.

Zvyagintsev, with his cinematographer Mikhail Krichman, employed "harsh lighting" and used a colour scheme with desaturated, greys and browns. Zvyagintsev described his direction:

The direction is towards the particular, the accuracy of the recreation of details: that is what allows anyone who watches to appreciate the sense of the work, though the sincerity, the honesty of its approach to human nature. If you try and tackle abstract problems, problems of society or the world as a whole, you'll never get anything done. You won't create anything.

Krichman elaborated he aimed for realism in his shots, made with a Arri Alexa digital camera, kept more stationary than its subjects.

Russian Film LOVELESS Wins Best International Film at Munich Film ...

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Release

Loveless competed for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017. It was subsequently selected for screenings at the New Zealand International Film Festival in July, and the Sarajevo Film Festival in August..It was selected for screenings in World Cinema section at the IFFK 2017 in December 2017

In Russia, it was released on 1 June 2017, relying on Cannes to build up interest in the film, while seeking theatrical showings before online piracy became widespread. Sony Pictures Classics has acquired the North American distribution rights, while Beijing WeYing Technology acquired the Chinese distribution rights.

London Film Festival: Andrey Zvyagintsev's 'Loveless' Wins Top ...

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Reception

Critical reception

At Cannes, The Toronto Star's Peter Howell praised it as "masterfully bleak", and endorsed it for the Palme d'Or, and said it was also leading in the critics' polls. On Rogerebert.com, Ben Kenigsberg predicted it would win the Palme d'Or, calling it "austere and beautiful, leisurely yet compelling". For Variety, Owen Gleiberman assessed it as "compelling and forbidding" and "an ominous, reverberating look" at "the crisis of empathy at the culture's core" in contemporary Russian society, rather than in its politics. Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars in The Guardian, praising it as a "stark, mysterious and terrifying story". The Hollywood Reporter's Leslie Felperin praised its intensity, avoiding a heavy-handed approach to many issues, including lack of social bond with in a more technological society, and how damaging relationships are passed down through family histories. In The Daily Telegraph, Robbie Collin awarded it five stars, hailing it as "pristine and merciless" and compared the ominous prologue to the 1973 Don't Look Now. Eric Kohn gave it three stars in IndieWire, claiming it fell short of Leviathan. On Vulture.com, Emily Yoshida called it "dour" with unlikable characters, and a lack of focus to make a coherent point, and said the positive was that it inspired gratitude in viewers who did not live under Russian President Vladimir Putin's regime.

Following Cannes, Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang assessed it as "a withering snapshot of contemporary Russian malaise". For The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis commented on the atmosphere and suspenseful cinematography. Mike D'Angelo wrote in The A.V. Club that with news stories about the Russian government's hacking following the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Loveless captured how civilians in Russia are also unhappy under its government. As of 9 December 2017 Loveless has an approval rating of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 51 reviews, and an average rating of 8.2 out of 10. The critical consensus is "Loveless uses its riveting portrait of a family in crisis to offer thought-provoking commentary on modern life in Russia -- and the world beyond its borders". It also had a score of 90 out of 100 on Metacritic.

Accolades

The jury at Cannes awarded it the Jury Prize. When the Russian Oscar Committee was selecting a submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Loveless's political critics campaigned against it, but it remained a frontrunner due to the Jury Prize and positive reception in North America. In September, it was selected as the Russian entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 90th Academy Awards; the Academy shortlisted it for a nomination in December.