Loveless (film)

October 2012, Moscow. Children are leaving school. A twelve-year-old boy named Alyosha walks along a path through a wooded area on the outskirts of town. He throws a strip of tape onto a tree. His parents, Zhenya and Boris, are divorcing and are trying to sell their apartment. Both parents have new relationships: Boris with Masha, a young woman who is pregnant with his child; and Zhenya with Anton, an older and wealthier man with an adult daughter. Alyosha overhears a fight between his parents, neither of whom claim to want him and are considering placing him in an orphanage. One day after spending most of the night with Anton, Zhenya realizes Alyosha has not been seen since the day before. The police believe Alyosha has run away and will return home within a day or two. When Alyosha does not return, a volunteer group specializing in the rescue of missing persons takes over the case and begins searching for the boy. The only relative Alyosha could have sought refuge with is Zhenya's estranged mother, who lives several hours away. Boris and Zhenya visit Zhenya's mother; their trip is punctuated by arguments, and they do not find any clues as to Alyosha's whereabouts. On the return journey home, Zhenya and Boris argue again; Zhenya says her marriage to Boris while pregnant was a mistake and she should have had an abortion; she also says she feels pity for Masha. Enraged, Boris stops the car and forces her out on a rural roadway. The police again become involved with the search for Alyosha, which covers an increasingly wide area of the town and its surrounding area. After a fruitless search of an abandoned building that Alyosha's friend, Kuznetsov, identified as their hideout, Zhenya and Boris go to a morgue to view the remains of an unidentified child whose description matches Alyosha's. Both parents deny the disfigured child's body is their son's, though the experience proves traumatic and they break down in tears. Some time passes; Boris and Zhenya's apartment has been sold, and workers dismantle wall hangings and appliances in Alyosha's old room. On the streets, missing-person posters of Alyosha are looking old and faded. In 2015, Boris now lives with Masha and their infant son, whom he treats coldly, while Zhenya has moved in with Anton. Three years after his disappearance, on the wooded path along which Alyosha used to walk home from school, the strip of tape he threw onto the tree remains as a surviving remnant of his existence. ==Cast==

won the role of Zhenya after a four-month casting process. The cast includes: ==Themes and interpretations==

Critic Adam Nayman argued the theme of Loveless is "neglect" and that Alyosha represents "the lost innocence of a society deep in the throes of self-absorption". The Financial Timess Raphael Abraham stated that while Zhenya and Boris are humanized, they are "at best distracted, at worst criminally neglectful". The story is told with "intense domestic detail" compared to the work of Ingmar Bergman and August Strindberg. Hynes argued Boris and Zhenya do not develop as characters after Alyosha goes missing but are made aware of the "abyss" within themselves. Critic Leslie Felperin said the source of Zhenya's bitterness is revealed in her background when she visits her mother. Horwitz also found the interiors of the residences "oppressive and unwelcoming". Boris is "terrified" his employer will punish him for the divorce on religious grounds. Koehler interpreted the damaged family as the product of a declining large society. According to Wenlei Ma, "It’s hard not to see Loveless as standing in for Russia’s wider problem—of the promises of Perestroika and Glasnost and the progress reforms brought, progress that has since been diluted by divisions, apathy and a state with no soul". According to Koehler, the film negatively depicts modern Russia in a restaurant scene in which young men and women exchange telephone numbers and take group selfies. ==Production==

Development Producer Alexander Rodnyansky said Loveless was envisioned as a reflection of "Russian life, Russian society and Russian anguish", but was also intended to be relatable to other countries. Rodnyansky also said a desire to look at a family was a starting point in the story's conception, and that the director and screenwriter Andrey Zvyagintsev started writing the story while visiting the United States in 2015. Zvyagintsev said the film began as an attempt to remake Scenes from a Marriage, the 1973 miniseries by Ingmar Bergman. Zvyagintsev claimed to have met Bergman at Fårö in 2003, where they discussed a remake of the miniseries. An unsuccessful attempt to buy the rights to the miniseries led writers Oleg Negin and Zvyagintsev to redraw the plot, deciding to base it on news stories about the search and rescue team Liza Alert. Negin submitted the title Nelyubov to Zvyagintsev, which the director said is a Russian word referring to both a lack of love and a dire spiritual condition. He later said Loveless was "over-politicized". The film also includes references to the war in Donbas. Zvyagintsev's earlier film Leviathan, about corruption in Russia, received 35% of its budget from Russia's Ministry of Culture. However, Loveless was made without financial support from the national government because the Ministry of Culture disapproved of Leviathan when it was finished. The producers neither requested nor received any offers of state support for Loveless, Zvyagintsev said. Rodnyansky instead appealed for funding from wealthy Russian Gleb Fetisov and foreign companies, including Why Not Productions in France and Les Films du Fleuve in Belgium. Casting Zvyagintsev said it was natural to cast Aleksey Rozin as Boris because he and Rozin had previously worked together twice. Zvyagintsev's desire to cast unknown actors led to the casting of Sergey Badichkin as Boris' co-worker. Filming . Principal photography began in Summer 2016. Filming was done in Moscow, Zvyagintsev and his cinematographer Mikhail Krichman used harsh lighting and a color scheme with desaturated grays and browns. On average, the filmmakers filmed twelve takes for each scene, and Krichman said some scenes needed up to twenty-eight takes. The scene in which Matvey Novikov runs down a hallway was filmed using by camera dolly; it took over four hours to film because of difficulties with lighting. volunteers inspired the story and consulted the production. During production, members of Russian search-and-rescue group Liza Alert advised the filmmakers and lent their equipment for use on screen. The dead child in the morgue was artificial. The film was still incomplete when it was selected on 13 April 2017 for screening at the Cannes Film Festival the next May, The crew decided to film a final scene for Loveless. Over the next month, editing of the finished version was completed; Zvyagintsev described the lateness of the process as "extreme circumstances". ==Release==

Loveless competed for the Palme d'Or in the main competition section at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017. The filmmakers and distributors could not find words for the title, Nelyubov, in English or French, and chose Loveless and ''Faute d'amour'', respectively. and Altitude Film Distribution purchased the rights to release it in the United Kingdom. It was subsequently selected for screening at the 2017 New Zealand International Film Festival in July and the Sarajevo Film Festival in August. In September, it was screened at the 2017 Toronto International Film Festival. The film was released In Russia on 1 June 2017, with distributors relying on Cannes to build up interest in the film while seeking theatrical showings before online piracy became widespread. It was released in the UK on 24 January 2018. releasing it in New York and Los Angeles in February 2018. On 23 January 2018, Pyramide Vidéo released Loveless on DVD in Region 2 as part of a boxset of Zvyagintsev's films. On 12 June 2018, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment released the film in Region 1 on DVD and Blu-ray. ==Reception==

Box office In its first two weeks of screenings in Russia, Loveless grossed 100 million rubles. In France, the film opened on 20 September 2017 and attracted 10,000 admissions. According to Sony, on its first week of release in North America Loveless grossed $30,950, an average of $10,317 per location. In its second and third weeks of its U.S. release, Loveless grossed $65,457, an average of $5,455 per location; and $60,583, an average of $2,423 per location. In Russia, the film made $2 million by February 2018, with 350,000 admissions. It also has a score of 86 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 33 critics, indicating "universal acclaim". At Cannes, The Toronto Star's Peter Howell praised Loveless as "masterfully bleak" and endorsed it for the Palme d'Or; he 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 called the film "compelling and forbidding" and "an ominous, reverberating look" at "the crisis of empathy at the culture’s core" in contemporary Russian society. Peter Bradshaw gave it five stars in The Guardian, praising it as a "stark, mysterious and terrifying story". For Izvestia, Kirill Razlogov commented on the realistic depiction of common life and on Spivak's and Rozin's portrayal of hatred for each other. The Hollywood Reporters Leslie Felperin praised its intensity, avoidance of a heavy-handed approach to many issues—including in its examination of lack of social bonds within a technological society—and the ways 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 its opening with the ominous prologue to the 1973 film ''Don't Look Now. Eric Kohn gave it a B in IndieWire and said it falls short of Leviathan''. On Vulture.com, Emily Yoshida called it a "dour" film 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. 's direction received positive reviews. He won the Asia Pacific Screen Award for Achievement in Directing. Following Cannes, Russian critic Andrei Plakhov wrote that the film effectively conveys poetry and grief. In France, Jacques Mandelbaum of Le Monde said Zvyagintsev established a dark tone in which the characters fail due to their selfishness and negativity. Le Parisiens Pierre Vavasseur commended the look of the film. For Les Inrockuptibles, Vincent Ostria called Loveless one of Zvyagintsev's best films, commenting on the pathos of the title. In Belgium, Le Soirs Fabienne Bradfer hailed Zvyagintsev as a master and Loveless as lucid and intimate. In the German newspaper Der Spiegel, Carolin Weidner focused on the selfish nature of the parent characters and their lack of awareness of their son's disappearance, and interpreted it as a parable of Russia wrapped up in the 2012 phenomenon. In Der Tagesspiegel, Andreas Busche said the dialogue regarding the 2012 apocalyptic fears leads into a colder period for Russia and regarded Loveless as nihilist. Some critics compared the Loveless to its inspiration, Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage. Los Angeles Times critic Justin Chang called the film "a withering snapshot of contemporary Russian malaise". For The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis commented on the atmosphere and suspenseful cinematography. Anthony Lane, in a positive review for The New Yorker, noted the bleakness of the film's story line but found it "so much more gripping than grim". Critic David Ehrlich named Evgueni and Sacha Galperine's score as the ninth-best cinematic soundtrack of 2017, particularly praising "11 Cycles of E" as "striking". Accolades The jury at Cannes awarded Loveless the Jury Prize. Producer Alexander Rodnyansky said that when the Russian Oscar Committee was selecting a submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, Lovelesss political critics campaigned against it but it remained a frontrunner due to the Jury Prize and the 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. ==See also==