As Mom and Dad opens, after a comically shocking preface, the Ryan family are presented as a typical all-American middle-class family – albeit one that, strangely enough, can afford a daily maid who cooks their breakfast.
Clio Barnard has quietly been building a reputation as one of Britain’s most human storytellers. Her debut feature The Arbor was a mesmerising look at the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, blurring the line between documentary and performance.
Greta Gerwig, in her hugely acclaimed, semi-autobiographical directing debut (a Golden Globe for best director, five Academy Award nominations) opens Lady Bird with a Joan Didion quote: “Anyone who talks about California hedonism has never spent a Christmas in Sacramento.”
McMafia has taught us to recognise one thing – you might call it the “Norton stride”. As the charismatic Alex Godman, James Norton has been advancing, confidently at screen centre, towards one challenge after another, and they have been coming (mildly put) from all sorts of unexpected quarters. He’s dealt with everything by pressing onwards, ignoring advice from all and sundry.
After the anger, the emptiness… Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless is his fifth film, and harks back to the world of complicated, somehow unelucidated family relationships that characterised his debut, The Return, the work that brought Zvyagintsev immediate acclaim back in 2003. His previous film, the tempestuous Leviathan from four years ago, was defined by a degree of social involvement that was new in his filmmaking, and engaged with contemporary Russia through the prism of politics. Its story of a lone individual’s clash with the corrupt society that surrounded him could not but provoke strong emotion.
Loveless sets out to do something different. It’s a film of wintry emotional withdrawal – a perfect pairing of season and subject – about the absence of almost any natural human core in the world it depicts. It’s as critical of its society as its predecessor was, but on a more oblique level, and arguably bleaker for that remove. There’s something of a loss in translation, too: the Russian title Nelyubov means, literally, “not-love” – almost “anti-love”, closer even to “hate”, but not quite that extreme. “Loveless” lacks the necessary muscle, as well as that particular Slavic antonymic essence that can assert absence as something far more visceral than simply a lack of presence. (The film’s French-language title, Faute d’amour, perhaps comes closer to the sense of the original.)
Zvyagintsev makes us view these proceedings almost as if we are observing animals
It is not a film defined by over-complexity. There’s a luminous clarity to the world that Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Oleg Negin (the director’s collaborator since his second film, 2007’s The Banishment) have created, which hints at the simplicity of parable. And “clarity” is as good a word as any to describe the particularly composed, poised cinematography of Mikhail Krichman, who has worked with Zvyagintsev from the very beginning. The sense that a style has evolved between them is strong.
The spare script drops us in medias res into the painful throes of divorce. Any love between Zhenya (Maryana Spivak, pictured below) and Boris (Alexey Rozin, lower picture) has eviscerated itself long ago; the final, symbolic dissolution of their marriage awaits the sale of their flat, which is one of those typical Russian living spaces where middle-class comfort within belies a coldly imposing, anonymous exterior. Desperate to leave their old lives behind, both have new partners, and the only remaining impediment to their assumed (separate) future happiness – one to which they have clearly not paid overmuch attention – is their 12-year-old son, Alyosha (Matvey Novikov, main picture). The only thing they still spar about is what to do with him, each wishing to offload responsibility onto the other.
Our sense of the boy’s alienation is conveyed practically without words, but speaks so powerfully: Zvyagintsev builds towards an unforgettable scene that defines the extreme of his agony, all the more shocking for its being set against the banality of his parents’ ongoing lives. We see them in their separate professional environments – Zhenya runs a beauty salon, Boris is a middle-management salaryman – as well as with their new partners. Boris fears that his divorce will be unacceptable to his ultra-religious employer, which is almost more of a worry than that he and his heavily pregnant girlfriend, the younger Masha (Marina Vasilyeva), are going be living with her mother. Zhenya has found new security with the older Anton (Andris Keishs), drawn as much by the attractive way of life that the prosperous single businessman offers her as by any attraction of the heart.
The director is engaging again with the differences of social class (which in Russia is defined as much as anything else by economic status) that were at the centre of his 2011 film Elena: it’s clearest in early scenes in which the couples are eating, one in an exaggeratedly posh restaurant, the other bringing their supermarket purchases back to the kitchen table. Then we watch them as they make love. The way that Zvyagintsev presents all this is characteristic: somehow he makes us view these proceedings almost as if we are observing animals, subjects engaged first with appetite, then recreation (sex-ercise?). The alienation is double, not only in the world of the director’s characters, but in his perspective, too.
This 'lovelessness', we come to understand, extends far beyond the present divorce
When Alyosha disappears – he’s reported missing from school before his distracted parents even notice his absence – the couple is forced to reengage, while the plot takes on an element of ongoing urgency and some rather welcome procedural tension. The police won’t take action immediately, recommending instead a volunteer search-and-rescue group (it's based on real-life Moscow precedents) to take over the investigation; it initiates increasingly large-scale searches of the area (the anonymous suburb in which the family lives borders on woodland). But there’s surely something ambiguous in how we perceive this citizen group action: it’s all impressively efficient and coordinated, especially when set against the lethargic reluctance of the police – yet do we wonder, in the wider context of Russian history, about the ramifications of such collective energy?
If Zvyagintsev leaves us to make up our minds on that one, he pulls no punches in the night scene in which the couple drive together to check whether their son has run away to his grandmother. Natalya Potapova plays Zhenya’s mother as a harridan haunted by history – her son-in-law describes her as “Stalin in a skirt” – and we begin to appreciate how her daughter has become who she is. The reception the old woman gives them is matched for acidity only by the bile they throw at one another along the way.
It’s a revelation that proves as terrifying as anything brought in the film’s resolution, which develops incrementally towards a conclusion that has all the inexorability of the territory (it comes with some exterior locations that match even Tarkovsky’s Stalker for wondrous dereliction). The dimensions of terror widen, becoming somehow ontological: this “lovelessness”, we come to understand, extends far beyond the present divorce, right “back to the beginning”. Is it fanciful to think of those moments of birth (rebirth) in Russian history of the last century, to go back to 1991, the collapse of the certainties and seeming securities of the Soviet world, even to 1917? It’s for the viewer to decide.
Of course, there’s another context behind Loveless too, the cinematic one that Zvyagintsev has alluded to not least in his acclaim of Ingmar Bergman, whose Scenes from a Marriage is, not surprisingly, a film he has referenced directly. But what is most potent in the way that the Russian director depicts his homeland is the sense that no alternative outcome could finally be possible, so rotten is this world in which the concept of empathy seems to have been entirely lost. Zvyagintsev may have altered his register – where Leviathan was painted with a broad brush, Loveless is a scalpel dissection – but his message remains constant.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Loveless
Carry on out of London past the Finborough Theatre and you hit the A4. Follow it east as it becomes the M4, take a southern turn at Bristol for the M5 and you’re in the West Country. Bude and Bodmin, Liskeard, St Austell, Padstow, Mousehole, Newquay and Newlyn. Out here are fishing villages, tin mines, granite churches, wide seas, surfers, pixies, low mental health indicators, and a great deal of unemployment.
The American family has seldom looked more desperate. Will Eno’s The Open House depicts a gathering of such dismal awfulness that it surely sets precedents for this staple element of American drama.
It's the people who are problematic, not the play. That's one take-away sentiment afforded by Caroline Byrne's sparky and provocative take on All's Well That Ends Well, that ever-peculiar Shakespeare "comedy" (really?) whose title is in ironic contrast to its emotional terrain.
That ages-old dictum "write what you know" has given rise to the intriguingly titled My Mum's a Twat, in which the Royal Court's delightful head of press, Anoushka Warden, here turns first-time playwright, much as the Hampstead Theatre's then-press rep, Charlotte Eilenberg, did back in 2002.
On paper this film sounds so worthy: a widowed Orthodox Jewish father struggles to convince the Hassidic community elders that he can raise his young son alone after the death of his wife. But it’s the opposite of worthy on screen – Menashe is utterly absorbing, deeply charming, and very funny. It’s an impressive first narrative feature by documentarian Joshua Z Weinstein, who brings an assured intimacy to the screen from the outset.
The film opens with a long-lens shot of Hassidic men walking on a city street; from their outfits and demeanour they could still be in pre-war Poland, but for the brick phones in their hands.The camera picks out one figure to follow, Menashe (Menashe Lustig), a flat-footed scruff in shirtsleeves who works in a kosher grocery store. His boss is pretty unscrupulous but Menashe’s a decent bloke who warns customers off dodgy goods and banters with his Colombian co-workers. Recently widowed, Menashe’s main concern is persuading the community elders that he is capable of looking after his young son Rieven (Ruben Nivorski, pictured below). Menashe doesn’t want to be married off hastily by a matchmaker, but that might be the only way to prevent Rieven being adopted by his disapproving and snobbish brother-in-law.
Filmed in Borough Park, an ultra-orthodox Jewish neighbourhood in Brooklyn, it’s to Weinstein and his producer Danny Finkleman’s enormous credit that they managed to win enough trust from the local Hasidic community to be allowed extensive access to the streets, restaurants and apartments of this closed world. Ultra-Orthodox leaders don’t allow devout followers to go to the cinema or have TV or the Internet at home; there is a great distrust of all modern media. Cast entirely from non-actors, the script was developed from Menashe Lustig’s own life story – he really is a widowed grocer with a young son – although it leaves out his sideline as a comedian who makes Youtube videos.
Menashe keeps messing up at work and in his family life. He's disorganised and scatty and while he wants to stay within his religious community he can’t accept all their rigid restrictions. He loves his son and is frustrated by his own inability to win him back to his tiny apartment and away from his wealthy relatives. Lustig plays the loveable schlemiel superbly and is well matched with characters from the neighbourhood, some of whom had apparently never seen a film, which must have made directing them challenging. Performed almost entirely in Yiddish, the dialogue was originally written in English by Weinstein and his co-writers Alex Lipschultz and Musa Syeed (surely the only time a Muslim has scripted a Yiddish film). One of the film's many charms is that it respects its audience’s intelligence; there’s no outsider character to act as mediator, and we’re simply immersed in Menashe’s world.
Weinstein has made a remarkable film which not only takes us inside a fascinating closed world without editorialising, but he's also given us a portrayal of a father and son’s bond which could stand alongside that neo-realist classic Bicycle Thieves. Beautifully shot by former photojournalist Yoni Brook, Menashe is enhanced by the subtle use of naturalistic sound and a sparse but highly effective original score. This is a small but perfect gem of a film.
Overleaf: watch the trailer for Menashe