"I don't care how the Minister of Culture perceives this film," snaps Andrey Zvyagintsev of Loveless. The award-winning film is the devastating story of a couple on the brink of divorce whose son runs away when he hears them arguing about putting him in an orphanage when they go their separate ways. It is also a story about Russia. I meet the director and his actors at the Cannes Film Festival, where Loveless wins the first of many prizes.
"I think that people back in my country will probably tell me I have made this whole story up: where have you ever seen people like that?" Zvyagintsev says. "The problem is the mirror. The people in power look into the mirror and do not like what they see."
Loveless director Andrey Zvyagintsev says his international success probably protects him: 'I just continue to do what I always do.'
Not that the story is ostensibly political; the battling couple and the escalating search for the boy grips like a police procedural. "I deal in intimate family relationships," says the director. "I like this word 'battlefield' to describe what happens there. People reveal themselves most completely in family life."
Boris and Zhenya (Aleksey Rozin and Maryana Spivak: both are extraordinary) married young and cannot wait to be rid of each other. Boris has a parallel life with a younger woman who is heavily pregnant with his child and counting the days until their new life can start; Zhenya is involved with Anton, a suspiciously rich older man who wines and dines her and is, she says, the only person she has ever loved. Their 12-year-old son Alexei (Matvey Novikov) is the one obstacle to that thing to which they each believe themselves singularly entitled: a lifetime of happiness.
Matvey Novikov plays a young boy who gets in the way of his parents' plans in Loveless.Credit: AP
What to do with Alexei? Boris may not have even told his new partner he has a son. Zhenya tells Anton that she never wanted a child. The birth was agonising. The baby was repulsive. "I'm a monster!" she titters. He smiles indulgently. "The most wonderful monster in the world." Well, it's early days.
"I'm sure this story could happen anywhere in the world," Zvyagintsev says, "because human nature doesn't change regardless of political circumstances or social status. People are the same everywhere: egotistical."
But Boris and Zhenya are also peculiarly Russian. They are part of a post-Soviet aspirational middle class; their flat is comfortable without being luxurious, part of a block on the city outskirts overlooking the forest where their son used to hang with his one nerdy friend in the ruins of an old Soviet-style hotel. They seem to live in a nether world, neither city nor country, overlooked by a radar dish; Boris has a good job behind a computer, but the company's boss – a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church – stipulates that everyone who works there must be married with a family and divorcees will be sacked. Boris' overriding fear when Alexei disappears is that his irregular domestic situation will be outed and he will be fired. Only in Russia, you think.
And yes, only in Russia, you think again when we visit a restaurant with Zhenya and Anton, passing by a screaming posse of plumped-up glamour girls raising their cocktails "to love and selfies". Of course it's Russia: as the search for Alexei grinds on, conducted in the absence of a functioning police force by a swat team of astonishingly committed volunteers, we keep hearing radio news bulletins about the war in Ukraine alternating with bizarrely bubbly predictions of apocalypse. "Do you think the world is going to end?" Boris asks his lunch companion in the company canteen. "Definitely," comes the reply.
Maryana Spivak and Matvey Novikov play a mother and son in the award-winning Loveless.Credit: AP
This is Loveless: a grey tapestry in which the private crisis and the world where it unfolds are woven tightly together. "They cannot be separated," the director told The Times. "The moral issues we are facing – the lack of empathy, the fundamental issues of human relationships, the corrupted emotional and moral fabric of the society and the family – all influence the social and political fabric of society. It's a vicious circle: both affect and influence each other."
It is this kind of pronouncement that upsets the Minister of Culture. Zvyagintsev's last film, Leviathan, showed corrupt local officials bullying an innocent working man in cahoots with an equally crooked priest. Most of the characters were drunks. It was quite brilliant; like Loveless, it won a lot of international awards. Russian politicians were not so keen. One far-right politician dubbed it "filth"; another said the director should get on his knees in Red Square to beg forgiveness and the minister himself, Vladimir Medinsky – whose department had funded the film – responded by drawing up a new set of guidelines forbidding films that "defile" Russia.
"Yes, Mr Medinsky was disappointed by Leviathan," Zvyagintsev said later. "He felt it showed Russia in a bad way. But I'm just telling the stories I see around me." He didn't try to get official funding for Loveless. "Our experience with Leviathan was too troublesome. But that was our decision. I just continue to do what I always do. Continue to move forward without looking back, without any kind of self-censorship." He says he feels no sense of threat – although the recent attack on the Skiprals in Britain might have made him rethink that – and has supported opposition leader Alexei Navalny, who was jailed three times in 2017, in demanding genuinely free elections. His international success, he says, probably gives him some measure of protection. He has no choice but to speak out.
Despite this history of controversy, the success of Loveless at the Cannes, Telluride and Toronto film festivals proved persuasive when awards season rolled around; a local campaign of opposition did not prevent it from becoming Russia's nomination for the Oscars. Zvyagintsev, whose dark themes and majestic compositions often lead to comparisons with Russian maestro Andrei Tarkovsky, commands tremendous respect. Among audiences, Loveless has clearly touched a nerve; Zvyagintsev says he has been approached by many Russians who want to confide their own family stories.
The tragic irony is, of course, that neither Boris nor Zhenya will ever be happy. "I think all of us want to be happy; each and every person wants that," Zvyagintsev says. "It is a kind of a dream that sometimes – very rarely – happens. Zhenya thinks happiness is supposed to fall from the sky, but she asks this question in the wrong direction – she asks it outwards when she has to ask it of herself, of how she lives and how she communicates with her son and her husband." She never really wanted to dump her son, he says, just to torment her husband with the prospect. Instead she and Boris go through hell.
At one point, the tormented parents have to visit the morgue. It is horrific. Both of them suddenly see what a mess they have made of things, "the whole fiasco of their lives". That revelation, however, lasts only for a moment. "The problem is," Zvyagintsev says, "that people have very short memories." They don't change; by implication, the country doesn't change either. Boris and Zhenya just find new ways to be unhappy. And that could happen anywhere.
Loveless opens on April 25.