RACING TO NOWHERE
by
Douglas Messerli
Oleg
Negin and Andrey Zvyagintsev (writers) and Andrey Zvyagintsev (director) Нелюбовь (Loveless) / 2017
If
you want to see a grim and often dreary film in which not much happens for long
periods of time as the camera lingers over the openings and/or closings of
various scenes, if you long for a film where 
nearly all the figures—expect for
the volunteer citizens who attempt to search for missing children—are truly
loveless and endlessly selfish, then Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is a perfect choice. For, in this film, not only are the
central characters, husband Boris (Aleksey Rozin) and wife Zhenya (Maryana
Spivak) heartless and unloving as they attempt to break up and find love in
what they perceive has a primarily loveless relationship, but they take their 12
year-old son, Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) down with them, openly expressing their opinions so
that he can hear them behind a closed door; neither of them wants custody of
him after the divorce, and they argue loudly over how to best put him in a
boarding school or even an orphanage before sending him off to the Russian
army.
Is it any wonder that the child, as
Zhenya describes him to total strangers who are considering purchasing their
apartment, is always crying—as if somehow, she and her husband have had no hand
in the boy’s sorrows?
Indeed, just before he disappears, after
hearing of his own loveless situation, we see him hiding behind the bathroom
door with a look of such horror on his face that it will remind you of Edvard
Munch’s famous painting The Scream,
even though his is a silent scream after basically having his heart pulled out
of his body by his fighting parents. By the end of the film we discover that
the intemperate Zhenya has had a similarly unloving Stalinist-era mother, who
has verbally abused her since childhood; and although Boris’ mother has died
before the film begins, we can only suspect, given how he treats and ignores
Alexey, and later attends to his new son born to his girlfriend and later wife,
Masha (Marina Vasilyeva), planting the overactive child back into its crib, was
probably maltreated by his family. In this film the failures of previous
generations have determined the heartless world in which the current survivors
exist.
Is it any wonder, moreover, that the terrified Alyosha bolts, presumably to hide out in the basement ruins of an old resort hotel that
looks like something out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker,
in which nature has almost completely taken over the former, most like greedy, operators
of the building? This 
child’s world, it is apparent, is filled with just such
“loveless” people as his parents. His mother has not even checked on him for two days while
running a hair salon, and hanging out with her older “lover” at nights—to whom
she admits, he is the first person she has ever loved—but she seems almost
momentarily relieved when she discovers from his schoolteacher that he has not
been in school for two days; and the police she is forced to call—after her
husband refuses to leave his job to help investigate—suggest they cannot truly begin
a new case for a missing boy for some period; these runaway kids, the detective
assures her, usually come back when they get tired and cold.
In fact, knowing that his boss, a
religious zealot who fires any employee who isn’t married or even gets
divorced, we can hardly blame Boris for not immediately leaving the office. He
is terrified of the unemployment he later seems to suffer. And, to give him
credit, after a horrifying meeting at Zhenya’s monstrous mother, whom they
visit with the volunteer group looking for their lost son, literally forces her
to leave his car after she brutally verbally abuses him, later on taking over
most of the legwork required in the attempts to find Alyosha.
As I have suggested, if there are any real
heroes in this movie, it is the volunteer group searching for the boy. Yet they
too behave with a sense of cold, almost doctrinaire, unison behavior, obviously
having found their role in the gap between the under-caring and under-funded
police. At least they offer temporary possibilities, posting placards
everywhere, calling hospitals, and questioning friends such as Alyosha’s comrade
Kuznetsov, who leads them to the old, dilapidated hotel. There they do find the
boy’s coat but discover no sign of the boy himself. When the brigade hears of an unidentified dead boy,
matching Alyosha’s age and hair color, who has evidently been tortured, both
parents claim it is not their son—although we don’t quite know for certain,
given the hysterics of Zhenya and her continued public verbal abuse of her ex-mate.
Even the coordinator of the search and rescue team suggests that they should,
perhaps, get a DNA test (some parents cannot digest the facts, he explains),
but she so violently rejects that possibility while Boris breaks to
uncontrollable tears, that we can suspect that the missing mole on the boy’s
chest may simply be a ruse so that they do not have to accept the reality of
their failures.
We can never know. And director’s camera
continues to look and investigate every spot along the boy’s path, but we see
only other people passing the new posters the good volunteers have put up,
years after.
At film’s end, Boris seems trapped in a
similarly unloving situation with his new wife, while listening to the Russian
daily news which posits that the Ukraine is in complete chaos, and will not
even allow in Russians to deliver new food, but simply kills everyone in
sight—lies promulgated, of course, by Putin’s government.
Zhenya, with her new husband, appears
equally unhappy, listening to the same news reports, and escapes sharing it
with her lover by retiring to the balcony, where she exercises on a stationery
running device. The last image of her, dressed in a Russian running outfit, is
one of racing toward nowhere, simply running in place, surely an image that
Zvyagintsev sees as the moral condition of Russian life. As the film’s producer
Alexander Rodnyansky argues, the film was envisioned as a reflection of
"Russian life, Russian society and Russian anguish.” Like many Americans, Zhenya, addicted to her cell phone, has lost complete touch with life.
Yet, despite all of this, Zvyagintsev’s
film keeps searching, ending with a brilliantly beautiful scene in the woods
where Alyosha visited in the movie’s very first frames. There we again see a
piece of plastic that the boy had discovered in the first scene and thrown into
highest branches of a tree. It waves still, almost as a banner, declaring the
life of this young man gone missing, one of so many in the Russian world of
missing young men. If the trees, the stream below, the ground, even the birds, seem
icy and forbidding, they still remain as beautiful images in cinematographer Mikhail
Krichman’s filming that in them we can almost understand this forest scene as a
shrine for the young life, clearly lost.
The boy, we know, will never be found, not
even if he has miraculously survived. The culture that has treated him as a
discardable object has taken away his very humanity.
That explains, at least part, why this
so very sad film was not only selected for The Jury Prize at Cannes, but as a
final nominee for the Best Foreign Film at the Oscars.
Los Angeles,
February 25, 2018