Loveless’ director, a two-time Oscar nominee, and cast talk bureaucracy and state condemnation in Russia
Andrey Zvyagintsev’s story about a divorcing Russian couple, who have to put aside their differences to find their missing 12-year-old son, highlights the indifference of state bureaucracy and has upset the Russian Minister of Culture
If the title had not already been used to great effect by Ingmar Bergman, “Scenes from a Marriage” might well have been an apt choice for Andrey Zvyagintsev’s latest film, Loveless. The fifth feature in his already decorated and acclaimed career, this tale of an estranged middle-class Russian couple begins as a persuasive and powerful meditation on marital discord.
“For two or three years, I’ve been dreaming of getting into this territory of a complicated relationship between a man and a woman at a complicated stage of marriage,” says Zvyagintsev, 54, via a translator. He imagined his couple 10 or 12 years into their union, “a time of crisis”, as he calls it.
He didn’t come across a suitable framework to hang his story on until he encountered Liza Alert, a non-profit Russian volunteer organisation set up to search for missing people. It was established just three weeks after the tragic 2010 death of five-year-old Liza Fomkina, who died of hypothermia after becoming lost in the Russian wilderness, a death that shocked the nation.
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When Zvyagintsev and his regular co-writer Oleg Negin discovered this group, ideas began to coalesce. They began to consider the enormous emotional strain on a marriage if a child disappeared without trace.
“That was the moment when these two stories came together,” he says, “because a missing child just made the whole situation even more dramatic and it even triggered the whole story.”
As the narrative evolved, the characters came into sharp focus. Middle-class couple Boris (Alexey Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) are on the verge of divorce, and embroiled with other partners, despite still nominally sharing a flat. In the midst of this turbulent domestic arrangement is their pale, withdrawn 12 year-old son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov).