Loveless, like any of Andrey Zvyagintsev’s films, is by no means an easy watch. It tests you emotionally, empathetically, attentionally and, to an outsider, referentially. However at the heart of Loveless’s narrative lies the titular concept explored in a number of forms. But this isn’t what I want to talk about after watching it. I want to hone in on a specific technique that recurs throughout the film that frustrated me at first, but by the end of the film I realised how wonderfully creative it was.
The device in question comes in a few forms but is fundamentally a hold before cutting to a new scene. Now this is nothing new, hence my initial frustration of it’s overuse, however it isn’t simply a hold on nothing but a hold which provides the impetus for new information to be presented—however the shot never reveals this added information. Let me give a couple of examples. (1) The shot holds on a bus stop with a missing poster. Slowly a person approaches and looks at it intently, they move over and stands waiting for the bus. Hold. Cut. (2) The team searching for the missing boy pass a fallen tree surrounded by shrubbery, they continue on out of shot. It holds with the shrubbery in the foreground. Cut.
This device is clearly a frustrating one. Traditionally (if one can use such a term) the camera will hold/linger on a subject only when it will provide us with new information. Thus such a lingering gives us the same expectation, we expect to be given information once the characters have left the shot and we are provided with only the environment, yet we are given nothing new. The environment sits still as the camera and our eyes search across it. Thus we are being tricked into paying attention to things which don’t matter—dead ends.
Yet this isn’t without reason. *Spoilers* The film itself tells the story of a married couple, both with second partners, looking for a divorce. In the background of their lives their 12 year old son lives a sad sobbing existence and one day decides to run away. Two days afterwards they find out, and the search begins—yet they turn up nothing and end up moving on with their lives. The device of holding to reveal only dead-ends both foretells the lack of information surrounding the boys disappearance and the character’s disinterest in finding him to continue their martially-tied lives together (remember only the camera [our gaze] is lingering on these environments, not the characters or their gaze). However, as a viewer, we can’t help but hold onto our conditioned ‘traditional’ hope that each shot will reveal new information to us and take us closer towards a clear resolution, happy or otherwise—i.e. the man at the bus stop has information about the boys disappearance or the bush contains the boy’s body. Even when we become used to the device as the film goes on it is almost impossible to kick this habit—at the very close of the film the camera sits in the child’s room, which is now being redecorated, it pushes towards the window. We see a single child climbing the hill—we ask is that him?—it pushes further to reveal many children and parents sledding down the snow-covered hill and still we search for relevant information that points towards a resolution, but there is none.
It is a difficult device to use so frequently as it risks alienating the viewer by making them endlessly pay too much attention to no avail—causing a loss of interest—or simply slowing down the pace of the film to the same ends. However Zvyagintsev and his team manage to utilise it perfectly to keep my eyes searching through each one in anticipation, only to provide the same empty cut at the end. How they did this I am not quite sure but it certainly teaches us a few lessons—both as creators and audiences. Firstly it shows the power of frustrating and misdirecting your audience, not through grandiose plot-twists but, by slow non-reveals. And secondly it teaches us to analyse our frustration as an audience—are they trying to force this feeling from us, what can we learn from that, how does it support the narrative?
In the case of Lovelesssuch a frustrating device to watch flourishes into a strong and wholesomely empathetic technique forcing us to lose hope in hopeful appearances as, like the characters learn time and again, happens so frequently in life.
Loveless (2017)
3/4/3
10/13
~Leo