In line with the laws of thermodynamics, entropy grows in this space. There is no god here (although there are bearded office workers in the company of an Orthodox businessman), just as there is no state – a policeman immediately warns the parents that the police won’t go searching for the boy. Here, families are dead and the school is hopeless: the schoolteacher helplessly drags a cloth across the blackboard leaving chalk smears, while outside the window the snow gradually starts to fall. There are not even guilty people here: everyone has simply been born and lives in a loveless space, which they diligently reproduce as the only method available to them for survival and communication.
The apotheosis of this emptiness comes in an abandoned building somewhere in the forest, the boy’s last refuge. The leaking roof, the puddles on the floor, the fragments of human civilization – all this reminds us of The Zone and The Room in Stalker, which was for Tarkovsky a metaphor for the deserted soul. Even the brilliant final scene in the mortuary (which, for its intensity and lack of resolution should go into a handbook for directors) is constructed around absence. We do not see the actual fact, the events, the dead body: all we see is the reflection in faces and the reactions of the characters. But the most frightening emptiness opens up in the film’s epilogue, in the eyes of the main female character, walking on a treadmill while wearing a fashionable Bosco tracksuit with the word ‘RUSSIA’ written in English. The camera seems to fall into that totally vacant stare.
The simplest thing of all would be to see this as a caricature of Mother Russia, having lost her child and walking on the spot on a treadmill on the balcony of an elite home, while her new husband mindlessly watches news from the Donbass on the television, as presented by Russian TV’s chief propagandist Kiselyov. But Zvyagintsev doesn’t use such obvious metaphors. He does not convict, he makes a statement; he doesn’t lay blame, he presents a diagnosis. He’s made a film about a broken family and it’s come out as being about Russia, and the Donbass and Kiselyov; the final scene is not a political pamphlet, as in Leviathan, but the Zeitgeist, a frozen picture on the TV screen. Ultimately, is Alexander Pushkin’s Boris Godunov a tragedy about a murdered boy, or is it about Russian power? It is a similar question with Loveless: it reveals a moral flaw, an abandoned boy, at the very core of our existence, but the war in the Donbass is simply one of the partial consequences of this comprehensive moral disaster.
It is crucially important that the time of the action is clearly shown in the film. It begins in December 2012, the eve of the passing of the Dima Yakovlev Law, otherwise known as ‘the scoundrels’ law’, which doomed dozens of sick Russian orphans who were waiting to be adopted by foreigners to a miserable life, worsening illness and, in some cases, death. It is exactly from this moment, when the ruling class was bound by the blood of the children, that the definitive moral decline of the state set in, accompanied as it was by the overwhelming indifference of the population. The film ends in 2015, ‘the year of normalization’, when the shock of Crimea and the shooting down of MH17 had passed, when Russia had grown used to the sanctions regime and understood that this new relationship between the state and society was serious and in for the long run. Zvyagintsev makes films about the family, but the action takes place in conditions of an unprecedented moral decline. And the basic problem here is not Putin and Kiselyov; it’s not in the Kremlin and the Donbass; and it’s not even corruption and theft: these are all merely symptoms of the disease. The director addresses the disease itself – it is society, mired in lies, cynicism and a lack of trust, having lost all hope for the future and for change; and Putin and Kiselyov simply cast this lie in the form of politics and the mass media, thus exporting it to the whole world.
It is certainly not a coincidence that in 2016 in the Russian public space the conversation turned to ethics: here we had the flash mob, ‘I’m not afraid to speak out’ (see above, ‘Breaking “The Silence of the Lambs”’), in which women spoke about the sexual harassment they have had to put with; about domestic violence and torture in Russian prisons; and about historic memory and the responsibility of Stalin’s executioners. The reflective part of society has begun to be aware of the moral dead-end in which we all find ourselves, and the conspiracy of silence that has surrounded the problems of violence, humiliation and trauma. These are exactly the questions that Zvyagintsev has been raising for many years, including the problem of not speaking out and the break in communication. In conditions where there is no state with a social policy, no church that is socially responsible or close to the people, no culture of public dialogue on questions of the family, childhood, or relations between the sexes, Zvyagintsev’s films present us with the very fundamental moral questions about which we prefer to remain silent – or leave them at the mercy of cynical populists like deputies Vitaly Milonov and Elena Mizulina, official defenders of ‘traditional values’. Andrei Zvyagintsev is now the main person in Russia raising the question of values – real values, not those dreamt up by propaganda – but the state will never acknowledge him in this role, preferring to limit the distribution of his films and defaming him in the press, as happened with his previous film, Leviathan, which they accused of being Russophobic.
One of the fleeting images in Loveless is signal tape. Right at the start of the film, the boy finds some in the forest. He ties it to a stick and throws it at a tree. The years pass, new children are born, but the tape remains there. It is as if Zvyagintsev has wrapped our society in this tape, marking the perimeter of the contours of the humanitarian catastrophe and the moral quagmire into which we have plunged. Like Pushkin’s ‘bloody boy’ in Boris Godunov, his lost child speaks about the fundamental crime lying at the base of our silent well-being, about the things we are trying unsuccessfully to forget. This is why this film is so ruthless, so discomforting – and such essential viewing.
THE AMPUTATION OF CONSCIENCE
The season of tolerance and humanity opened in Russia: as its representative at the finals of the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest in Kiev, Russia chose Yulia Samoilova, a singer in a wheelchair. Shortly before the competition, it had seemed as if Russia would boycott it, given that it was taking place in the capital of a country with which Russia is de facto at war. But suddenly, in a single magical moment, everything changed: with one generous gesture Russia was returning to the bosom of this international festival, rising above the military conflict, and announcing that it was adhering to global standards of tolerance and equal opportunities.
And everything would have been wonderful in this Hollywood-like story, demonstrating that music and the will to live can triumph over hatred and division – except that the shadow of the Kremlin propaganda machine could be seen sticking out from underneath this great humanitarian subject. The problem was that in July 2015 Yulia had performed in Crimea after it was annexed by Russia, and had travelled there without the permission of the Ukrainian authorities. Thus, Ukraine was presented with a cynical choice by Russia: either allow a singer who had broken the law in Ukraine to take part in the competition, thus violating its own principles and norms; or refuse her entry, thus opening itself up to a guaranteed artillery barrage of Russian propaganda and the judgement of the international community. The Ukrainian musician and actor, Anton Mukharsky, even proposed greeting Samoilova at the airport in Kiev accompanied by hundreds of Ukrainian Army soldiers who are now permanently disabled as a result of the battles in the Donbass.