The film begins with Moscow after the snow. Boris and Zhenya are a divorced couple living in Moscow. They have their own new lovers, but they quarrel endlessly over the custody of their child, Alyosha. One day, Alyosha heard a serious quarrel between his parents in the bathroom and decided to run away from home. By the end of the film, it was a year later in Moscow in March 2012, but their children never came back.
Sarkinsev's film is first and foremost an exploration of love and family in urban society. The Boris family is middle-class by Moscow standards, with their own three-bedroom apartment and car and raising their sensible children. However, such a seemingly happy family combination is indeed facing the end of an impending divorce. Zhenya has come together with an older wealthy businessman, and Boris has a new woman. Zhenya likes taking selfies very much, and there are many close-ups of Zhenya taking selfies in the film.
For Sarkinsev, selfies and iPhones are symbols of alienation for urbanites, and they shape material worship and modern urban lifestyles through selfies. In the dinner at the high-end restaurant, Zhenya's flirting with wealthy businessmen and lovers, in contrast to her image in the family, once again demonstrated this material worship. Boris seems to be a typical scumbag, and when his new lover asks if he will treat himself like Zhenya before, Boris has remained silent. He has also been hiding the fact of how many women he has slept with in the past, and seems to be proud of it. It's a beautiful and colorful world, but the couple apparently had a baby in a daze, they weren't ready to raise a child, and they didn't know what marriage meant to them.
This contemporaneity can be traced back to the history of Russia, also in the TV news at the end of the film, facing the Ukraine war in 2012, a middle-aged woman who has lost a loved one shouts to the camera: "We are the typical working class. , we work hard, why are we taking my relatives?" 25 years after the end of the socialist dream, in the Soviet Union, on the one hand, in Moscow, capitalism has changed the city, and on the other hand, in Ukraine, there are still people living in the Soviet Union. of nostalgia.
The second is the criticism of reality. "Leviathan" is a representative work that exposes the corruption of the Putin government. The American film weekly "Hollywood Reporter" once criticized the corruption of the Putin government for such a film, which was strongly supported by the Russian Ministry of Culture. Surprised by the fact that it was filmed. In recent years, excellent works of social criticism in Russia have emerged one after another. In 2014, "Dangerous Buildings and Fools", a film about the chain effect of the "tofu dregs project", became the dark horse of the year.
In "No Love to Complain," Sarkinsev turns his attention to the police system and men in Russia. Initially, the police ignored the report of the child's disappearance, and even thought it was a waste of time. The complicated and cumbersome process of launching the investigation program also makes parents lose the best time to find their children. Later, under the pressure of the superior, a huge search operation had to be started under the whole city, and the missing person notices in Moscow also formed a contrast and a certain irony with the initial inaction of the police.
What caught the attention of the audience was that the director in the film mostly had a prejudice against the images of Russian men presented with arrogance and inaction. From the male protagonist to the Russian police, and then to the tenant who bought the house. What everyone sees is the arrogance that seems to be self-centered, and the arrogance that hides is indeed cowardice and weakness. Facing the corpse in the autopsy room, the male protagonist sat in the corner crying, and his Confucianism finally left him with nothing. The Moscow police also showed an unapproachable arrogance during the Zhenya investigation, and after the case escalated, they had to put aside the official style and go to every possible place to find the child to find the child. Russia has always been called a "fighting nation", but behind this "fighting nation" is it another kind of cowardice?
Returning to the body of the movie, there seems to be an obvious "hard flaw" in the screenwriting. For the first 30 minutes, the director's focus is on the couple's relationship with their respective lovers, and then the whole film becomes a police movie about finding a child. Such excessive force makes the focus of the story unclear, and at the end of the film does not echo the discussion of couples and lovers at the beginning, which also makes these two extramarital relationships seem unclear.
Of course, we can't demand the perfection of every movie, but the thoughts on society and family brought to the audience by "No Love to Tell" are beyond the greatest significance of the movie itself.
Originally published by Phoenix Entertainment: http://ent.ifeng.com/a/20170519/42936123_0.shtml
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