Zhenya and Boris planned their future lives so precisely that their son Alyosha fell just as precisely outside those plans.
Alyosha, as a character, has no personal traits at all — even the boy's appearance is chosen so that he's hard to remember or describe. "No distinguishing features." Within the story, the viewer can only, with a heavy heart, guess at what's going on inside this teenager. He merely exists; it's his parents, long since exhausted by each other, who actually live, argue, and get irritated.
Only in the opening do we truly meet him, and understand the extent of his loneliness — he even makes himself a toy out of garbage, a strip of red-and-white plastic tape meant to cordon off space. The confined space of his life, caused by a total lack of parental attraction toward him. And it's only in the final shots that we're reminded of that tape, still hanging there unfastened by anyone, fluttering in the wind, no longer cordoning off anyone's space at all. It stays in the viewer's memory as a symbol of that absent attraction — a silent witness to a life cut short.
Alyosha's status is defined with brutal clarity: he is a victim of circumstance, and, most terrifying of all, entirely mundane circumstance at that.
The handful of lines he speaks throughout the story exist purely to demonstrate his mother's attitude toward him — a complete absence of attraction. Alyosha doesn't even try to push back; he simply mirrors his parents' indifference, which, naturally, doesn't bring anyone closer. Unlike them, though, he can't actually do anything about it — not even just talk about it — and for a while all he has left is crying, crucially, with no one in the family around to see those tears.
Zhenya is preoccupied with an upcoming relationship with a man she can talk about with pride to her girlfriends, since he fits neatly into conventional ideas of a desirable partner. It bothers her that, having every element in place to start a successful new life, the same social expectations that guided her choice now work against her — because within that same framework, she's now a mother willing to give up her own child.
Her attachment to Instagram, to putting her life on display as looking, on the surface, "just like everyone else's," runs far deeper than any feeling for Alyosha, which fundamentally corrupts her whole claim to belonging in that beautiful world of social conformity. Round and round she goes, finding people to blame: a husband she doesn't love, an unwanted child, a difficult labor twelve years earlier...
Boris, with his new partner, says essentially nothing about his own emotional baggage, which is understandable. He's on a new arc that looks a lot like a familiar trap — though it's too early to judge that. For now: mutual attraction, everyday humor, emotional support through his partner's pregnancy hormones — Boris is clearly doing his duty, and in that, he's genuinely fine. And yet Zvyagintsev's visual language, for some reason, never lets them turn on the lights in their new home.
They come back from the store, put groceries away in the fridge — all of it happening almost in the dark. Evening light, apparently, only matters during sex, and the same dim lighting shows up in Zhenya's bedroom with her new boyfriend — that half-darkness quietly implies that these two new couples are together purely for entirely natural, external reasons of mutual attraction, a kind of attraction too fleeting by nature to signal anything deeper. But maybe not...
The characters' sense of attraction forms entirely by contrast with the circumstances surrounding their lives. Anything capable of manufacturing an illusion of happiness for either of them individually counts as "attraction" — on one crucial condition: it must have absolutely nothing to do with the broken family, right down to selling the apartment. Any new emotion, different from the ones this unloving couple dragged between them for twelve years, gets treated by both of them as something genuine — something worth holding onto, something worth building a life around.
In the scenes of searching for the missing boy, Zvyagintsev exposes Zhenya and Boris's parental instincts: on some subconscious level, the viewer even feels a warm flicker at the father's anger, at the line "he's going to get it from me," said on the way to the mother-in-law's with a volunteer. And it almost feels sweet for a second — oh, look, he's going to discipline his disobedient son! How fatherly that sounds!
But no. Even this seemingly parental impulse — "he's going to get it" — comes across as helpless and low: fully aware of what's at stake, all Boris can muster out loud toward his missing child is aggression, optimistically soothing his own nerves. His confidence that his son will turn up any minute says a lot: to him, Alyosha is simply a "son object" that's suddenly started behaving unpredictably, whose obedience had always been so reliable that any disruption to his own plans because of the boy can only be irritating. But we understand what's really happening — Boris is running headlong from a guilt that's already gripped him tightly. Zhenya, in that sense, is more honest: unlike Boris, she's free of any machismo, and doesn't even try to convince herself that Alyosha's disappearance is anything extraordinary. She knows she's guilty, and powerless to fix any of it.
So when it comes to "attraction" in the context of "Loveless," we can really only talk about its complete absence within this family. Like every strong story, this one is built on the idea that a critical mass of circumstances leads inevitably to tragedy — something you can only fully grasp in hindsight, because in the moment, everything looks like a perfectly natural human desire to build a happy life. And here, bitterly enough, the ends justify the means, one of which turns out to be an unwanted leftover of a long-dead love: a silent boy named Alyosha.
The one moment of genuine "I don't buy it" worth pausing on in this film is the viewer's confusion about what exactly these parents were doing with their son for twelve years, if, at his hardest age, he feels not just no love or support from them — but the opposite: everything's arranged as though he's tacitly expected to understand, on his own, that he's simply in the way.
That, though, doesn't get in the way of watching the film, because that blind selfishness rings far too true, and finds a frightened echo somewhere inside the viewer too. It's exactly that echo that makes the viewer instinctively become an advocate for the situation, understanding that even in the face of such glaring indifference, there may genuinely be no one to blame.
Because love, like the lack of it, is often passed down through generations — a point underlined by the scene with the grandmother, who's clearly convinced herself, with a kind of bitter satisfaction, that she's long been surplus to this family — probably so she doesn't have to face her own inability to love either. Maybe her own childhood had similar troubles too, but that no longer matters.
The disappearance — the presumed death of Alyosha — is the logical endpoint of a lovelessness passed down from generation to generation.
This film could just as easily have been titled "Unfreedom" — the very condition that creates the ground on which the characters make their later choices, trying to break out of this hellish loop of inert obligations. One could argue that Alyosha found the only way out of that unfreedom: by simply disappearing, ending up, in effect, everywhere and nowhere at once.
You'd think tragedy would finally give this unloving couple something in common — but after the identification, all they can do is weep separately. Unable even to embrace each other, they'd rather drive the truth of their own Lovelessness away, deep down into their own minds.
Alyosha, as a character, has no personal traits at all — even the boy's appearance is chosen so that he's hard to remember or describe. "No distinguishing features." Within the story, the viewer can only, with a heavy heart, guess at what's going on inside this teenager. He merely exists; it's his parents, long since exhausted by each other, who actually live, argue, and get irritated.
Only in the opening do we truly meet him, and understand the extent of his loneliness — he even makes himself a toy out of garbage, a strip of red-and-white plastic tape meant to cordon off space. The confined space of his life, caused by a total lack of parental attraction toward him. And it's only in the final shots that we're reminded of that tape, still hanging there unfastened by anyone, fluttering in the wind, no longer cordoning off anyone's space at all. It stays in the viewer's memory as a symbol of that absent attraction — a silent witness to a life cut short.
Alyosha's status is defined with brutal clarity: he is a victim of circumstance, and, most terrifying of all, entirely mundane circumstance at that.
The handful of lines he speaks throughout the story exist purely to demonstrate his mother's attitude toward him — a complete absence of attraction. Alyosha doesn't even try to push back; he simply mirrors his parents' indifference, which, naturally, doesn't bring anyone closer. Unlike them, though, he can't actually do anything about it — not even just talk about it — and for a while all he has left is crying, crucially, with no one in the family around to see those tears.
Zhenya is preoccupied with an upcoming relationship with a man she can talk about with pride to her girlfriends, since he fits neatly into conventional ideas of a desirable partner. It bothers her that, having every element in place to start a successful new life, the same social expectations that guided her choice now work against her — because within that same framework, she's now a mother willing to give up her own child.
Her attachment to Instagram, to putting her life on display as looking, on the surface, "just like everyone else's," runs far deeper than any feeling for Alyosha, which fundamentally corrupts her whole claim to belonging in that beautiful world of social conformity. Round and round she goes, finding people to blame: a husband she doesn't love, an unwanted child, a difficult labor twelve years earlier...
Boris, with his new partner, says essentially nothing about his own emotional baggage, which is understandable. He's on a new arc that looks a lot like a familiar trap — though it's too early to judge that. For now: mutual attraction, everyday humor, emotional support through his partner's pregnancy hormones — Boris is clearly doing his duty, and in that, he's genuinely fine. And yet Zvyagintsev's visual language, for some reason, never lets them turn on the lights in their new home.
They come back from the store, put groceries away in the fridge — all of it happening almost in the dark. Evening light, apparently, only matters during sex, and the same dim lighting shows up in Zhenya's bedroom with her new boyfriend — that half-darkness quietly implies that these two new couples are together purely for entirely natural, external reasons of mutual attraction, a kind of attraction too fleeting by nature to signal anything deeper. But maybe not...
The characters' sense of attraction forms entirely by contrast with the circumstances surrounding their lives. Anything capable of manufacturing an illusion of happiness for either of them individually counts as "attraction" — on one crucial condition: it must have absolutely nothing to do with the broken family, right down to selling the apartment. Any new emotion, different from the ones this unloving couple dragged between them for twelve years, gets treated by both of them as something genuine — something worth holding onto, something worth building a life around.
In the scenes of searching for the missing boy, Zvyagintsev exposes Zhenya and Boris's parental instincts: on some subconscious level, the viewer even feels a warm flicker at the father's anger, at the line "he's going to get it from me," said on the way to the mother-in-law's with a volunteer. And it almost feels sweet for a second — oh, look, he's going to discipline his disobedient son! How fatherly that sounds!
But no. Even this seemingly parental impulse — "he's going to get it" — comes across as helpless and low: fully aware of what's at stake, all Boris can muster out loud toward his missing child is aggression, optimistically soothing his own nerves. His confidence that his son will turn up any minute says a lot: to him, Alyosha is simply a "son object" that's suddenly started behaving unpredictably, whose obedience had always been so reliable that any disruption to his own plans because of the boy can only be irritating. But we understand what's really happening — Boris is running headlong from a guilt that's already gripped him tightly. Zhenya, in that sense, is more honest: unlike Boris, she's free of any machismo, and doesn't even try to convince herself that Alyosha's disappearance is anything extraordinary. She knows she's guilty, and powerless to fix any of it.
So when it comes to "attraction" in the context of "Loveless," we can really only talk about its complete absence within this family. Like every strong story, this one is built on the idea that a critical mass of circumstances leads inevitably to tragedy — something you can only fully grasp in hindsight, because in the moment, everything looks like a perfectly natural human desire to build a happy life. And here, bitterly enough, the ends justify the means, one of which turns out to be an unwanted leftover of a long-dead love: a silent boy named Alyosha.
The one moment of genuine "I don't buy it" worth pausing on in this film is the viewer's confusion about what exactly these parents were doing with their son for twelve years, if, at his hardest age, he feels not just no love or support from them — but the opposite: everything's arranged as though he's tacitly expected to understand, on his own, that he's simply in the way.
That, though, doesn't get in the way of watching the film, because that blind selfishness rings far too true, and finds a frightened echo somewhere inside the viewer too. It's exactly that echo that makes the viewer instinctively become an advocate for the situation, understanding that even in the face of such glaring indifference, there may genuinely be no one to blame.
Because love, like the lack of it, is often passed down through generations — a point underlined by the scene with the grandmother, who's clearly convinced herself, with a kind of bitter satisfaction, that she's long been surplus to this family — probably so she doesn't have to face her own inability to love either. Maybe her own childhood had similar troubles too, but that no longer matters.
The disappearance — the presumed death of Alyosha — is the logical endpoint of a lovelessness passed down from generation to generation.
This film could just as easily have been titled "Unfreedom" — the very condition that creates the ground on which the characters make their later choices, trying to break out of this hellish loop of inert obligations. One could argue that Alyosha found the only way out of that unfreedom: by simply disappearing, ending up, in effect, everywhere and nowhere at once.
You'd think tragedy would finally give this unloving couple something in common — but after the identification, all they can do is weep separately. Unable even to embrace each other, they'd rather drive the truth of their own Lovelessness away, deep down into their own minds.
Loveless
Original text translated by Claude