In THE WHITE RIBBON (2009), Michael Haneke pictures a little community, obsessed with ultraviolent actions, to show that when the violence reigns, the war is inevitable. If the allegory is forgotten and the audience follows a drama, the main notion is completely ignored since there are no powerful characters and dazzling complications to entertain the viewers. The film works in its depiction of violence and follies of the people.

In LOVELESS (2017), Andrey Zvyagintsev depicts a loveless society to indicate how a big war begins when there is no love and hearts are not open. Instead of focusing merely on the allegory, the director tries to build up a drama with concrete characters, trapped in their personal obsessions for starting a new life and ignoring everyone and everything surrounding them. Thus it is the lack of relation to surrounding people and objects make the life too meaningless and the outbreak of war so close.

To achieve this, Zvyagintsev relies on the images as the main film words. When a kid finds out that in a loveless world, his parents are going to get a divorce, he will be afflicted. Then the director decides to portray the affliction through one image rather than unceasing flow of the words. The image of the boy, hiding behind the door and weeping silently, recalls the best of the Bergmanian shots and is easily engraved in the cinematic memories. Meanwhile the visual structure of the film, emphasizing on the lack of relation from the very first moment, reflects the magic of the movies on the silver screen once again.

Even before the disappearance of the kid and the start of the action for desperately seeking him, the director makes a vital decision to create the world of the film. Once in an interview, Francis Ford Coppola mentioned that he had decided to shoot a family in the park, strolling in the beautiful shots, and then, when the kid is missing and everybody is searching, the absorbing nature turns into the labyrinths of horror. Zvyagintsev does not choose the same way as he does not focus on the relativity, but on the portrayal of a loveless world on the brink of a horrible war. Therefore the nature is also shown as hostile as it is ever painted. Trees are dim, frozen figures and byways are led into the fog and the darkness. The interaction between the shots joined to each other is a formalistic venture to create the atmosphere. So the rhythm is also created, not verbally, but visually. Suffering from living in a loveless world, the kid even tries to relate to the nature which is the only one, bearing a trace of his and remembering him constantly.

Picturing the human beings, all people seem to be there just in order to please themselves – even the members of the non-governmental search group are portrayed as some uncompassionate robots automatically performing their humanistic job. So in this level, LOVELESS rings an alarm to the world hasting towards some big wars. But whenever falling into the abyss of raw symbols (for instance, outlining the word, “Russia”, on the mom’s shirt) and verbal descriptions (for instance, when the mom retelling the frustrating story of her marriage in the car), the film could be simply reduced to a propagandistic piece or a repetitive melodrama. So if approached in another way and read as a melodramatic work, LOVELESS will be most possibly fallen into the abyss of oblivion as well. But as an allegorical tale, it proves to be an outstanding achievement in the world cinema today.

K.