Loveless

Andrei Zvyagintsev's Loveless (Нелюбовь) won the Jury Prize at Cannes 2017 and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2018. The film consolidated Zvyagintsev, after the political-confrontational Leviathan (2014), as one of the most internationally significant Russian directors of his generation. The film was Russia's official Oscar submission for Best Foreign Language Film.

A Moscow couple (Boris (Aleksey Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak)) are in the final, poisonous weeks of their divorce. They are both preparing to move on with new partners (Boris's pregnant younger girlfriend, Zhenya's wealthy older lover) and to vacate the marital apartment they cannot continue to share. Their twelve-year-old son Alyosha (Matvey Novikov) is the bystander to their continuing arguments and the unwanted complication in both their plans. When Alyosha disappears one morning before school, the film follows the search across the days that follow.

The film operates as procedural-search-drama, sustained study of contemporary Russian middle-class urban life, and quiet meditation on what kind of moral environment produces what kind of children. Mikhail Krichman's photography of Moscow exteriors (autumn-and-winter forests on the city's edge, the high-rise apartment-block geography) produced one of the most distinctive landscape registers of recent Russian cinema. Spivak's central performance, in particular, is among the most committed in recent Russian-language acting.