Loveless: a character study and thriller that criticises Russian society as stagnant, self-absorbed and materialist

Andrei Zvyagintsev, “Loveless” (2017)

As with previous films of Andrei Zvyagintsev that I’ve seen, “Loveless” is as much a criticism of modern Russian society and what it values as it is of the individuals who pursue hedonistic and materialist goals to the exclusion of all else. The film opens with a Moscow couple, Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak), in the middle of divorce proceedings trying to sell their apartment to interested buyers and ignoring their only son Alexei (Matvey Novikov) who suffers in silence at his parents’ bickering. After the potential buyers leave, wanting more time to think the potential purchase over, Boris and Zhenya get stuck into tearing strips off each other while Alexei hides and cries in distress. Over the next day or so, Boris and Zhenya ignore each other by burying themselves in work during the day – and Boris worrying that his conservative Orthodox Christian bosses will turf him out if they discover that his marriage has broken up – and partying with new lovers in the evening. Eventually the couple notice that Alexei has gone missing and call the police. The police are tied up with various other cases of missing persons and refer Boris and Zhenya to a group of volunteers who help them search for Alexei.

The characters are very one-dimensional – Zhenya is a screechy, self-absorbed harpy while Boris is passive and hardly says anything much to defend himself – and everything in the film  from the cinematography and the plot to the visual narrative of various buildings (progressing from comfortable and modern to derelict and decrepit) is overloaded with symbolism and meaning, ultimately referring us to the same banal message that Zvyagintsev’s films usually broadcast: that Russia is a stagnant society given to hysteria and emotion, and Russians are a people who never learn from their mistakes. Working class people in particular come in for heavy condemnation but most significant characters in this film are obsessed with being on the make, acquiring wealth and luxury with the least amount of effort, using other people and checking social media constantly. Dysfunctional family relationships and conservative Christianity come in for heavy criticism, as though these exemplify and underline darker aspects of modern Russian culture and society.

The film’s attempt to create a parallel between Boris and Zhenya’s deteriorating relationship on the one hand and on the other hand their later relationships and even the separation of Russia and Ukraine and the resulting war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine is clumsy and contrived. Sex scenes are far too long and do not add anything significant about the characters who engage in them. While the cinematography can be good, even beautiful (as at the beginning and the end of the film), it dwells a great deal on the bleakness of Moscow winters as a metaphor for the bleakness and apparent apathy of modern Russian life.

Ultimately the film itself takes on a hermetic and self-obsessed bent as it trudges on to a devastating climax, at which (implausibly) Zhenya still rejects Boris as he tries to comfort her. The two later go their separate ways and resume their old habits – and psychological isolation – in new surrounds with new partners. At times the action and plot narrative in the film come across as unrealistic. Zvyagintsev seems intent to keep his characters as undeveloped as can be to bang home his criticism, however deserved or undeserved, of Russia.

I can see that future films of Zvyagintsev are going to be as stagnant and unchanging in the cheap pot-shots they take at ordinary people, as the society he believes Russia to be. Unfortunately those social and other structural problems of Russian society that Zvyagintsev takes to be symptomatic of the worst aspects of Vladimir Putin’s governance and the society that has developed under his leadership – the indifference of the police towards two parents who have lost a child, the alienation of individuals within families, family conflicts that pass from one generation to the next, the insidious influence of conservative religion through elites – are readily recognised by Western audiences as also typical of their societies: these problems are ones produced by capitalist societies.

A significant political interview of amazing revelations in “Secret World of the US Election: Julian Assange Talks to John Pilger”

John Pilger, “Secret World of the US Election: Julian Assange Talks to John Pilger” (, October 2016)

One famous Australian journalist talking to another famous Australian journalist should be a major media event covered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation or the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) but unsurprisingly neither of these networks was interested in promoting, let alone broadcasting, excerpts of John Pilger’s astonishing interview of Assange in which nearly every reply Assange gives to Pilger is a jaw-dropping revelation of the depths of the corruption of one of the two major candidates in the 2016 US Presidential elections – I’m referring of course to Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party candidate – as revealed in Wikileaks’ releases of emails hacked from the Clinton campaign manager John Podesta’s email server and leaked to Assange’s organisation. The really amazing thing about this interview is that both Assange and Pilger manage to keep their nerve talking about Clinton’s connections to Saudi Arabia and Qatar among others through her and her husband Bill’s humanitarian charity Clinton Foundation and those nations’ funding of ISIS; her obsessive pursuit of regime change in Libya that resulted in Muammar Ghaddafi’s death and mutilation; and the US political establishment’s attempts to derail the other US Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s campaign, among other matters discussed.

Those who can’t or won’t bring themselves to believe that Hillary Clinton is steeped in corruption and has broken numerous US laws, from laws on government record-keeping to laws on the conduct of private charities, the law on perjury and laws regarding conflicts of interest during her time as US Secretary of State (2009 – 2013), are advised to refer to various blogs and websites (not all of which are politically partisan) detailing her many blunders and crimes: 21st Century Wire is one good website as are also Club Orlov and among others.

The excerpts from Pilger and Assange’s conversation are gathered up into two main subject groups: the Podesta emails detailing the scope of Hillary Clinton’s numerous conflicts of interest, and Assange’s own predicament, holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, awaiting possible extradition by the UK to Sweden on trumped-up charges of rape.

Without a doubt, this interview must be one of the most significant political interviews of 2016 and it is a great pity and tragedy that it isn’t more widely known and broadcast in Australia at least, if not in the United States. The interview and its transcript can be viewed at this link.






Sergei Eisenstein, “Battleship Potemkin” (1925)









Deduction and reason versus propaganda in pursuit of the truth in “Through Sherlock’s Eyes: The Case of Alexander Litvinenko”

Alexander Korobko, “Through Sherlock’s Eyes: The Case of Alexander Litvinenko” (2015)

Not only does this 23-minute documentary present an intriguing scenario of the death of the Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko from polonium contamination – a scenario that, among other things, not only exonerates his supposed murderer Andre Lugovoi (a former KGB guard later turned businessman and Russian State Duma representative) but also possibly explains why the British inquests into Litvinenko’s death go nowhere – but it does so in a calm, laid-back way that eschews Hollywood-style hugger-mugger razzle. Taking us into the matter is Vasily Livanov, posing as the Russian Sherlock Holmes, sitting at ease in his armchair and reading out aloud the work done by amateur Russian and British sleuths who shared their information online.

The documentary presents its case that Litvinenko contaminated himself with polonium and carelessly left traces wherever he went, which explains how not only Lugovoi himself ended up contaminated but also other places in London that Litvinenko frequented (but which Lugovoi never visited) also were found to have traces of the element on their premises. Firstly Lugovoi is subjected to a polygraph lie-detector test administered by expert Blake C Burgess and is found to be innocent. The documentary then turns its attention to the US writer Masha Gessen’s scribbling about Litvinenko’s case in her book on Russian President Vladimir Putin (“Putin: the Man without a Face”) and, using information obtained from an interview conducted with an American nuclear physicist, demolishes Gessen’s weird claim that the isotope of polonium that killed Litvinenko was made only in Russia by government workers in 2006 and that Russian President Vladimir Putin personally ordered the hit on Litvinenko. The US scientist adds that polonium can be ordered online in tiny amounts. (Plus polonium is used in textile factories throughout the world, including the Indian subcontinent where the bulk of the global textile manufacturing industry is located.) Finally a British citizen journalist visits the Abracadabra Club in London, where polonium traces were found, and speaks to the manager there. The manager recognises photos of Litvinenko’s employer Boris Berezovsky and an associate, Mario Scaramella; but on seeing Lugovoi’s photo, says he does not know the man.

The documentary is easy to follow though its case is not entirely persuasive. The polygraph lie-detector test is not infallible as Burgess himself admits. The Yes / No questions asked of Lugovoi might have been phrased and framed in such a way that a bystander could easily predict the answers he gave. Only one employee at the Abracadabra nightclub is interviewed. Viewers may need more convincing that Gessen is not simply a jealous Putinophobe and that other people have criticised her writing and research. Other possibilities as to how Litvinenko might have died – he might have died from some other toxin and the polonium story is simply a cover to hide the real cause of death – are not considered.

How Litvinenko originally came in contact with the polonium and why is not part of the documentary’s scope so some viewers may be disappointed that the sleuthing done by citizen journalists only exonerates Lugovoi of murder but goes no further. The aim of the program is basically to strip the politics away from the circumstances of Litvinenko’s death and by doing so, demonstrate how the man and the way he died are being used to demonise Russia and its government by the British and other Anglophone news media. Implied here is the notion that the British news media is acting as the propaganda arm of the British government in pushing an agenda that wilfully separates the peoples of Russia and Britain from pursuing common interests and values by fanning the flames of conflict between them.

The documentary treats its viewers intelligently and does not condescend to them with blaring lights, a hasty pace, jagged editing and flashy special effects. Not for the first time do I find myself wishing all documentaries could treat its viewers with respect.

How I Ended This Summer: a meandering character study of two individuals coping with extreme isolation and one another

Alexei Popogrebsky, “How I Ended This Summer / Kak ya provel etim letom” (2010)

Out of a very threadbare and unbelievable plot, Alexei Popogrebsky manages to craft a fairly interesting character study about human frailty, the need that people have for connections with one another, isolation in an extreme environment, modern humans’ relationship with nature (and how they have damaged and poisoned it) and forgiveness. A young university student, Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin), is sent to a meteorological station in the Russian Arctic to work with Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis), an old-timer set in his ways who takes pride in the work he does there. Pavel finds the work of making daily periodic reports on the Arctic weather and tidal conditions monotonous and boring. Sergei sees Pavel as lazy and immature because the younger man is easily distracted by boredom and plays video games when he should be learning about the environment around him so he can write his essay. The two men do not get on at all and can barely tolerate each other; Sergei even cuffs Pavel on a couple of occasions when the latter makes minor errors in his work. Pavel is easily intimidated and becomes quite paranoiac.

One day Pavel gets an urgent message from their superiors at the State Meteorological Service while Sergei goes out on an unauthorised 2-day fishing trip: Sergei’s wife and only child have died in a car accident. Pavel is supposed to tell Sergei straight away of the news and to get him to contact their employer who is sending a ship to collect Sergei. Because of his fear of Sergei, Pavel neglects to tell him. This failure to pass on important news sets in train a series of events that escalate in seriousness and results in life-threatening danger for both men in very different ways: Pavel through his paranoia and stupidity has several brushes with death and exposes himself and Sergei to radiation poisoning from an abandoned isotope beacon.

Filmed on location in Chukotka, close to Alaska, the movie features stunning scenes of wild subarctic landscapes and vast skies changing colour as the season passes through mid and late summer into early autumn. Long immersive shots of nature reinforce the sense of extreme isolation in this harsh environment where to make one mistake – as Pavel does, and he makes more than one mistake – could mean the difference between life and death. This of course means the film is quite slow in pace and stretches the thin plot almost to breaking point. There is very minimal dialogue which puts great demands on the two actors, particularly Dobrygin, to express emotions and motivations through their characters’ inexplicable behaviours. Both actors do excellent work in portraying two generational types: Sergei representing the stoic older man who puts duty, self-sufficiency and responsibility before personal feeling and comfort (and who sometimes bends the rules whenever he wants to spend time fishing), and expects Pavel more or less to do the same; and Pavel as the young, impulsive and immature fellow who wants to have a good time but is dependent on a disapproving older man who maybe has spent too much time away from other people and is lacking in current social graces.

The cat-and-mouse chase that occurs in the latter half of the film is ludicrous as Pavel is convinced that Sergei is unhinged and is out to kill him, and he plots to outwit Sergei. (The irony here is who is really unhinged, Pavel or Sergei.) The result is a climax that is grim and devastating in its stark and minimal delivery as Pavel confesses what he has done to the fish Sergei has been drying outside their hut and which the older man has been eating. At this point, one expects Sergei to really go ballistic and take his rage out on Pavel but the denouement that follows is just as jaw-droppingly unexpected as Pavel’s confession.

Perhaps the one major weakness of the film is that, having revealed Pavel’s weakness of character, it does not show his redemption, if indeed any has taken place with or without Sergei’s participation. Sergei’s acceptance of his family’s deaths and possibly his own impending death appears unbelievable, at least to Western audiences. Obviously Sergei has forgiven Pavel for his immense moral baseness in poisoning him but how this forgiveness has taken place and under what circumstances is never shown. We cannot tell if Pavel has grown in maturity as a result but we have to assume that he has.

With the themes it has, the film might have been expected to be heavy-going but with minimal dialogue and long scenes of nature and silence, it carries its message lightly. Yes, humans have done great harm to nature and to one another, but when faced with extreme dangers, they must band together for survival no matter what they have done to one another in the past, and forgiveness and acceptance of one another’s faults and crimes must at times override such insults, no matter how awful, horrific and even life-threatening they are. Unfortunately by the time the film reaches this point, it has meandered on and on for so long that this message has the feeling of being tacked on just to round off the narrative and give it a raison d’être.


















MH17: A Year Without the Truth – uncovering the secrecy surrounding the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 shootdown

Yana Erlashova, Vitaly Biryukov, “MH17: A Year Without the Truth” (RT Documentary, 2014)

On 17 July 2014, Malaysian Airlines Flight MH-17, carrying nearly 300 people, was shot down in the Donbass region in eastern Ukraine. Over a year later, debris from the shootdown is still being uncovered, the investigation into the incident is still shrouded in secrecy and the narrative accepted (without much questioning) by the mainstream Western news media that the passenger jet was hit by a BUK missile fired by Donbass rebels, supposedly backed by Russia, is not backed by the evidence so far recovered. What is also very odd is that one of the parties likely to be culpable, Ukraine, has signed a non-disclosure agreement with Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands  which allows any of the signatories to veto any attempt by other signatories to release results of the investigation into the shootdown to the general public. In this context, a documentary about Flight MH-17, the secrecy around its fate and what actually lies behind that secrecy by Russia Today (RT) is not only welcome but necessary.

The documentary takes the form of various interviews with people in Malaysia, parts of Europe and the Donbass area where the plane went down, all of whom have some interest in the shootdown: among others, the families of Captain Wan Amran and a co-pilot who were part of the flight crew are interviewed as are also close relatives of a couple of passengers on the jet. The RT team also talk to some of the people who are still recovering debris from the fallen jet in fields around their homes. Dutch blogger Max van der Werff, Malaysian engineer Mohammad Azahar Zanuddin and German freelance journalist Billy Six (who visited the crash site and spoke to witnesses) are among those who doubt the official Western narrative of a BUK missile having brought down the jet. For different reaons, everyone interviewed expresses a desire to see the secrecy surrounding the plane’s shootdown lifted and the facts about how it came down made public: the grieving families of the two crew members need to know how their loved ones died so they can get on with their lives; others such as the Berlin lawyer representing German families who lost relatives in the crash believe that Ukraine must bear responsibility at least for allowing Flight MH17 to fly over an area where civil war was raging and the Donbass rebels had brought down a military jet.

The interview with the relatives of Captain Wan Amran is quite revealing in sections where the women say they were not allowed by the Malaysian government to view the dead pilot’s body directly, let alone touch it to prepare it for proper Muslim burial. The Dutch blogger says that he learned more about the case by visiting the crash site than on what he saw on his laptop; he also questions the Netherlands’ role in leading the investigation into the shootdown, given that the country is a member of NATO and therefore cannot be an impartial party. The German freelancer admits that initially he believed Western reports about who shot down the plane but after visiting the crash site and talking to people in the area, his opinion changed. Local people tell the RT reporter that they saw military jets approach the jet and shoot at it. The Berlin lawyer says that he received death threats by phone from someone claiming to be a Ukrainian Nazi. Most tragic of all is the story of the co-pilot who left behind a young wife pregnant with their first child.

Astonishingly in one scene, the RT journalist and a local Donbass resident in Petropavlivka find fragments of the Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777; the resident points to a round hole in one piece of the wreckage. They take the fragments to a local government building where a woman tells them that the fragments are set aside for the Dutch Safety Board to collect.

Later in the documentary the former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir bin Mohammad bemoans his country’s lack of spine in insisting on obtaining the truth about the crash and in following the Western news reporting in spite of the lack of evidence. He did not think that the investigation into the crash is being carried out objectively.

Although the RT documentary does not claim to have discovered who is responsible for the shootdown, what evidence is presented defies the official Western account and suggests very strongly that the Ukrainian government and military may be complicit in bringing down the plane. Why the Western narrative puts the blame on the Donbass rebels (and by association, Russia) is never explained – the aim of the documentary is mainly to penetrate the secrecy surrounding the crash – and so the shootdown is not placed in the context of the civil war in Ukraine and the parties behind that war that wish to see it continue and drag Russia into the fighting, so as to drain and ruin its economy and possibly destabilise that country and make it ripe for a colour revolution masterminded by Washington.

A more detailed exposition of what happened to Flight MH17 that would put it into a wider context that includes the ongoing war in Ukraine, what is at stake behind it and the media propaganda surrounding its reporting would have been welcome; this documentary does not do nearly enough but given the paucity of information so far about the crash, it is the best there is. Curiously, after this documentary was broadcast, its makers were contacted by the Dutch Safety Board for help in obtaining the fragments of MH17 shown in the film.

Leviathan: a hollow and dishonest film insulting to ordinary people ground down by corruption

Andrey Zvyagintsev, “Leviathan” (2014)

Often taken as reflective of the current socio-political situation in Russia, this film about an ordinary man, living in a remote part of northwest Russia, who loses everything due to local political corruption, other people’s betrayals, the hypocrisy of social institutions and just the fickle hand of fate was actually inspired by a series of events in the US town of Granby, in Colorado state. In the early 1990s, Marvin Heemeyer bought some land and built a muffler shop. He later agreed to sell the land to a concrete company. He then changed his mind and demanded a higher price for his land. In 2001, the local council rezoned the land and gave approval for the concrete company to build a factory there. Heemeyer fought the council’s decision (because the factory would interfere with his own business) over several years and got support from family and friends to resist it, all to no avail. In 2004, with a bulldozer that he customised himself into a virtual tank, Heemeyer demolished Granby’s town hall, the mayor’s house, several other buildings and a number of vehicles including a police SUV. Ending up stuck in the basement of a store he had razed, and surrounded by a SWAT team, Heemeyer committed suicide with his handgun.

In Zvyagintsev’s story, Granby becomes Pribrezhny, an Arctic town that has seen better days as a Soviet factory city and Heemeyer becomes Kolya (Alexei Serebriakov), the local mechanic who is fighting a crooked mayor who wants Kolya’s land to build a new development. The mayor, Vadim (Roman Madyanov), repossesses Kolya’s property at a price less than the property’s value and begins moves to evict him. Kolya enlists the help of his old army buddy, Dima (Vladimir Vdovichenkov), who works as a wily lawyer in Moscow. All their appeals come to nought in court however. Dima manages to find some dirt on Vadim and threatens to expose him. Encouraged by an Orthodox priest, Vadim issues his own threat against Dima and Dima is forced to back off. In the meantime, Kolya has to deal with a delinquent teenage son Roman (Sergey Pokhdaev) who has fallen in with a local gang and his wife Lilia (Elena Lyadova) who works in the local fish plant and who secretly yearns to leave the town and the rural isolation. Bit by bit, Kolya is undone not only by Vadim’s scheming but also by Lilia and Dima when they start an affair together, and his own anger when he and some friends discover the couple’s indiscretion. A chain of events is set in motion that plunges Kolya into further hell and which reveals the corruption of Russian social and cultural institutions, the hollowness of love and friendship, and the failings of human nature. End of story.

For all the fine acting and the beautiful cinematography which makes Pribrezhny and its natural surroundings significant characters in their own right, I found the film itself hollow and dishonest. Several major characters, most of all Dima and Elena, are simply not believable in both their intelligence and stupidity: why would Dima and Elena commence an affair, knowing that by doing so they are betraying Kolya in the hour of his greatest need? It’s as if Zvyagintsev enjoys playing a pitiless God just to see how much he can make Kolya suffer. The film is meant to be about how ordinary people with all their strengths and weaknesses cope in a world where Fate always holds the upper hand, and good fortune can suddenly be swept away by bad, and yet Zvyagintsev seems to think that Kolya must be made to suffer more by ridiculously contrived situations such as Elena and Dima’s sudden love affair and his later arraignment for murder based on circumstantial evidence. Zvyagintsev’s treatment of Kolya, the simple car mechanic whose main failing seems to be drinking too much vodka, is unsympathetic, even scathing: Kolya’s reaction to every problem is either to fall into a blind rage or blind drunkenness, and the character, for all his street smarts (to the extent that he calls on a clever Moscow lawyer to help) and skill with fixing cars, seems incapable of helping himself as he is led away to jail.

The scenes that involve hypocritical or unconcerned priests add very little to the plot and serve mainly to bash the Russian Orthodox Church in a pointless and tedious way. There may be much to criticise the Church for – it did co-operate with the Soviet government in the past, and it may very well be corrupt for all I know – but Zvyagintsev’s harsh treatment of its representatives as one-dimensional idiots suggests an agenda against the Church per se and not a true criticism of its practices or program.

Oddly enough, the one character who seems true to type and who might actually invite audience sympathy is the crooked mayor who revels in stealing Kolya’s property and using thugs to kick city-slicker Dima back into his place, yet needs the bishop Vasily and the priest Lyosha to help him when Dima threatens to expose his crimes to Moscow police. Although Vadim resorts to violence to get his way, his reason for doing so is understandable. His own hypocrisy is open to the audience but he is incapable of seeing it himself; Zvyagintsev intends that the church scene in which Vadim appears be a condemnation of both Vadim and the Russian Orthodox Church, yet the audience is likely to think that Dima and Elena have committed the greater sin of betraying Kolya.

Supposedly a film about how the little people are made to suffer by the corrupt workings of government and greedy individuals together with implacable Fate, “Leviathan” ends up looking more like an insult against ordinary people like Kolya, who does what he can with the resources he has to survive.